A young girl, or even a young boy between the ages of say six and 10, who receive Disney cookie cutters as a birthday or holiday present, may be perplexed at first and think this would be a grown-up gift. However, if these cookie cutters were given to them by an older sibling, one of their parents, grandparent or a close aunt or uncle, then they may realize that the gift comes with an afternoon of fun in the kitchen.

Spending a day in the kitchen with your favorite grown-up is a dream come true for many young children because it makes them feel more grown-up, more in control and as if they have more say over what is going to happen during the process and in this case it is making cookies. By introducing young children to baking cookies in the kitchen, an adult is introducing that young child to a whole host of different things such as responsibility, listening skills, decision making skills, learning to do it yourself and of course one of the hardest lessons of all is patience in waiting for the cookies to bake and then cool enough to handle before decorating and eating them.

A child will always remember their first day of baking cookies, whether their first cookie was a Mickey Mouse cookie cutter stamped carefully over soft sugar cookie dough or little balls of chocolate chip cookie dough rolled between chubby little fingers, making cookies is a lot of fun for children of all ages.  But making imprints with various different cookie cutters and then decorating them when they have cooled off is perhaps the best part of making cookies.

Many people take ordinary food coloring and brand-new small paintbrushes and allow their children to ‘paint’ the various shapes and characters from the different cookie cutter sets to make cookie cutter art that is not only beautiful but edible.  Depending on the effect one wants to achieve with the food coloring, painting the cookies before they go in the oven will produce a lighter colored cookie than if the children are allowed to paint the cookies after they have come out of the oven and cool a while.