Citrus Swirls

I tend to dread school vacation days. Days that run to the tune of something like this: "Ma, I'm soo bored" peppered with "Heeey, stop pushing me" with a harmony of " Ma, tell him to geruff me *whack*..." (and you have to get the tune just right); its enough to make an extremely even keeled and patient person go crazy.
Hey, you think I can put the kids to bed at 4:45pm?
Oh, never mind.

So, I try to approach these vacation days with the attitude of an army general headed towards war. I have a clear battle plan, and no deviation from the plan may occur.
Just "bonding" with three little monkeys for 120 hours straight (and yes, nights are counted. Don't argue with me) is not a plan. First of all, I start planning months in advance- Pinterest is amazing just for this alone. (Huge,huge Pinterest fan by the way. Whoever invented it is a genius. Just a side note here.)  I also find that when I have minor trips/activities spread out over the vacation days, the spaces in between those activities have lower incidences of violence, as opposed to days without any trips/activities. So, last week we found ourselves at this adorable place called Kidz Village in Kenilworth NJ. It didn't occur to me to blog about it while we were there, so I neglected to take useful pictures of the place, but they have a great website that you can check out here. Definitely worth the entrance fee. And they do not charge for adults,which is an added bonus. So that left us with "free" activities this week: namely, going to the library and baking.

Do not let the playful colors fool you- this was a hard recipe to make! I was surprised, since it looks so cute and fun. The kids loved the concept, and it was fun to pick out the colors and flavors, but next time, I would pick a more kid friendly recipe to try out. I think the best part of baking with the kids was (of course aside from the yummy cookies afterwards) that Z-Monkey got to practice his reading and math! I handed him the recipe to read out loud and that kept him really busy! Although I did look over his shoulder to make sure it sounded right, he was really proud to have done such a central part of the baking.
 I am going to be honest with you here (am I ever not honest with you?): I did have some issues with the recipe, which we were able to resolve, but they were issues nonetheless. I am going to post you the link to the recipe where I found it, and afterwards I will post "troubleshooting" and how we solved it. Have fun, and if you are home with your kids on vacation: Stay sane. 

Citrus Swirl Cookies
I originally saw it here, who found it on here , who saw it here and here. 
Wow, these little babies have been around the block and back again!

And now for my notes:

1. As you may or may not have noticed, these are not officially called Citrus Swirl Cookies. We called them that since we used orange and lemon flavoring.  You can really use any flavoring you want, or none at all. If you want to turn this into an all day activity- hit up your local grocery store and check out the extract aisle. You can really have fun with the color/flavor combinations: 

Strawberry (pink) and Bananan (yellow)

Strawberry (pink) and cream (vanilla,white)

Lemon (yellow) and mint (green)

chocolate ( add 1 tablespoon cocoa and 1 tablespoon water) and mint (green)

orange creamsicle (white and orange swirl)

I'm sure you get the idea...

2. All the recipes I saw insisted you must use a food processor or the recipe wont work. We started off in the food processor- but the dough did not form a ball! It was just crumbs, so we added 1 tablespoon water and transferred it to the kitchen aid, and it was fine. 

3. After rolling it out, the recipe says you should freeze each layer. (Actually it says refrigerate, but whenever I see "refrigerate" in a recipe my brain reads "freeze". Who wants to wait an hour when the freezer does it in 10 minutes?) I think this is so that you can flip over the first layer onto the second layer easily without it cracking. Once you roll it up though, make sure both layers are basically room temperature, with a slight chill. 

4. We rolled the dough (we, meaning: me) on a piece of foil which helped a lot. I rolled the foil together with the dough to hold it together and then pulled out the foil as I went along. 

5. Regarding rolling- roll as tight as you can! If its loose, the swirl won't come out as nice.

6. The dough did crumble a little as I rolled. I took all the pieces that fell off the sides, and made on small log of "marbleized" dough for extra marble cookies. 

7. The recipe says to cut the log into 1/8 to 1/4 inch slices. I whipped out my tape measure and saw that was quite impossible- it would have crumbled to pieces! My cookies ended up being 1/2 inch which was a drop too thick- hence the need to bake the cookies for 25 minutes instead of 15. If you can slice these babies to 1/8 of inch, they would for sure be much better, but I'm not sure how to manage that, so if you do- please let me know!

8. Do not, and I repeat: Do not bother to sweep until the cookies have all been eaten or safely put away in the freezer. These guys are little crumb monsters. From the dough, to the sprinkles to the actual cookies- they drop crumbs wherever they go!