So, you know what’s not a good idea when cooking with toddlers?  Turning your back for even one second.

Because if you do, you’ll turn around and find cookies that look like this:

And this:

Also not a good idea?

Loosening the lid on your brand-new, $5.00 bottle of rainbow jimmies and pushing them to the back of the counter, thinking they are “out of reach.”

The next step of decorating these “quick and easy” cookies involved using the vacuum cleaner attachment for 15 minutes to suck sprinkles out from between the refrigerator and the cabinets and from underneath the end tables in the living room.

See the design on my site header that shows a cracked egg and a spilled pot of spaghetti?  It’s real life here, people.  This is how I roll.

At this point, I was seriously considering scrapping the entire homemade cookie idea.  It was late, I was tired, and I barely had enough sprinkles left to finish the project.  But the next day was my son’s last day of Mom’s Day Out; his last time trotting off to what is basically a play group before starting preschool a few weeks later.  The room for “big kids,” we call it.

But my son isn’t a big kid, not really.  He just turned four.  He’s my baby, whether he wants to be or not.  And babies need cookies to take playgroup to share with their friends.

Especially when they said the evening before, “Mama, I want to give you a hundred kissies because I love you a million times up to the moon.”  If that doesn’t deserve homemade cookies, I don’t know what would.

Also, I’d just purchased this cookbook and was dying to try it out.  A more apt title might be, “1 Dough, 100 Pounds.”  I’m thinking of giving it a try.

 And about those broken cookie pieces?  Don’t worry, I um, got rid of them.

After making cookies and cream cupcakes a few weeks ago, I decided I would try a strawberry version to send to school with the Doodlebug.  I’m finding out many things as a parent, namely that strawberry cake is the preferred confection of children across the nation.  Maybe the world, I don’t know.

Someone explain this to me.  Cheesecake, I get.  Wedding-white, yep, I’m with ya.  Lemon and chocolate?  I’m down with those, too.  But strawberry cake?  Not so much.  I mean, I’ll eat it–it is cake after all–but it would never be my first choice.

However, I’m determined to keep the moniker “best cooker in the whole world” even if it means resorting to bribery.  And anyone who says they would never bribe a child is clearly someone who doesn’t have kids.

Okay, so start by dropping a whole vanilla Oreo cookie into your cupcake liners.  Next, sift together your dry ingredients.  Eat an Oreo while you’re at it.

In your mixer bowl, cream together your butter, sugar and vanilla.

Add whole eggs and the white, one at a time, and beat until incorporated.  Add flour mixture in two batches, alternating with the milk.

Fold in chopped strawberries by hand.

So, I may or may not have “sampled” so much of this batter that later I practically went into a sugar-induced coma.  But this was maybe the best cake batter I have ever eaten.  I don’t make proclamations like this lightly, and I have sampled a lot of cake batter in my day. 

Make these–even if you don’t care for strawberry cake.  Even I may have been converted to a strawberry cake lover.

Fill your cupcake liners three-quarters full.  Provided you didn’t eat too much of the batter, you should have enough to make 30 – 34 cupcakes.

Bake at 350 for 25 to 30 minutes.

I used the Wilton buttercream icing recipe, adding approximately 4 crushed Oreos to the icing before piping.

Recipe: Strawberry Milk-Cakes

Recipe adapted from Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes

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