Getting Crafty (with recipes AND cookies)

Last week I had the idea to finally use the train shaped cookie cutter that my mom had bought for Vince a while ago; so I decided to whip up some sugar cookie dough, invite the neighbor kids, and get Vince into the spirit of art by setting up different colors of frosting for him to "paint" the cookies with. Now some of you may know that when I decide to bake something, I usually decide to throw in different twists while following the recipe, usually to try and make it a bit healthier, or substituting this for that because I don't have a certain ingredient, and sometimes just because I downright don't want to follow directions. My husband is constantly amazed by this because he always says to me "if there's a recipe you should really follow and not diverge from, it's things that you are baking!". Apparently it's super easy to mess up baked goods/items if you don't follow the rules exactly, but for some reason I've had mostly good luck when diverting from baking recipes.
Anyway...... back to our cookies. To make a long story short, my sugar cookies turned out a bit healthier than normal because I decided to use whole wheat flour and (too much) flax seed, but that was canceled out by the ridiculous amount of walnut oil I used to fix the dough (mind you: walnut oil, flax seed, and whole wheat flour were not part of the recipe). At first this concocted mixture didn't want to roll into a dough because the whole wheat and flax made it too dry, but it was nothing that 1/2 a bottle of walnut oil couldn't fix! The cookies turned out great I swear...

It took a bit of coaxing to get Vince to cut out the dough

But he was totally on the ball with painting the train cookies

beautifully decorated trains

Then again, after Thanksgiving we had a chance to make some gingerbread men because Mike's mom gave us a gingerbread man baking pan. This time I gave in and just followed the recipe that the pan came with. No 'fixing' needed.

Vince ate the leg and arm off before finishing up his decorating job. poor little gingerbread man!

The ever popular tie-dyed ginger man