Ben's Fossil Cookies

Rebecca's seven year old, Ben came up with this cute cookie idea. After seeing knife marks in some baked scones we had made he thought we should figure out how to make fossil cookies. We decided that a shortbread cookie dough would work well since it doesn't puff or flatten.
We used a very simple recipe from our better Homes and Gardens Cook Book. This recipe is so easy that Ben made the dough himself.

What you need:

• plastic dinosaurs
• 1 1/4 cup of flour
• 3 tablespoons of sugar
• 1/2 cup of butter
• chocolate chips (optional)

Preheat your oven to 325 degrees.

Gather up all your dinosaurs. We used all different kinds and sizes.

Next we gave those dinos a bath. Ours often end up in playdough or paint.

We placed the flour and sugar in our food processor and gave it a quick pulse to stir. Then we added the butter and blended until it looked like cornmeal. You could do this all by hand, but the food processor worked great and was so fast. Next we poured out the dough onto our counter. The dough will be very powdery. Ben didn't believe it would become cookie dough. We kneaded the dough until it was smooth.

We formed the dough into a 2 inch log and sliced it into 1/2 inch slices.

Then we pressed the different dino parts into the rounds of dough to make an impression.

We then placed them on ungreased cookie sheets. This dough won't really spread much so you can get a lot on one sheet.

The boys used all different parts of the dinos to make the impressions - skin, feet, teeth, tails horns and faces. The cookies were placed in a 325 degree oven for 25 - 30 minutes just until the bottoms just started to turn golden.

We let the cookies cool on the cookie sheets and then decided that they would taste even better with melted chocolate chips spread on the bottom. We were right!! The boys had so much fun and the cookies were so easy, we immediately made another batch.