Year-End Teacher Gift: Personalized Thank You Cookie Note

As a parent volunteer for the school, I'm exhausted right now. I don't know if it's just Kindergarten but there are so many festivities at the school at the end of the year. About a month ago, I signed on to take over the school newsletter as well. We send out a newsletter weekly so I've been busy! The current newsletter editor will be too busy next year since she will be the new PTSA President so I agreed to take over her current responsibilities, which is the newsletter work and managing and updating the PTSA website. I didn't know how much work it was going to be when I said yes to this. Lol.

Today is the last day of school. I had these grand plans to do custom chalkboard cookies for my son's teacher, similar to what I did in the past for "Back to School." However, after helping out with the kids year-end party picnic, I just had no energy left. To make matters worst, it's been hot here as well and I haven't been sleeping well. I had to ditch my grand plans and just go with two giant rectangular cookies, which I then turned into a personalized note and painting. I figured anything involving food markers and food paint would be fast.

For the personalized thank you cookie note, I drew lines on it for my son to write on. Since this was all done at the last minute (this morning in fact!), I had to write out what the message would look like and I had him copy it. We couldn't afford mistakes so last night he actually practiced twice with my husband on a piece of loose leaf lined paper. We had to wait until this morning to write on the cookie though since it wasn't fully dried yet. I made the royal icing thicker too but it still took about 24 hours for them to dry. In fact, we should have waited a few more hours for them to dry completely. It was still very fragile and my son was instructed to write as lightly as possible with the marker. It all seems easy enough but the icing surface dents and cracks easily and the ink smudges easily. Both of these things did happen but it wasn't that bad. It would have been nice to let the writing dry a bit longer too but I had to package them right away for delivery this morning. More smudging! Oops.

For the painted cookie, I decided to paint one of the teacher's favorite flowers, sunflowers. All the teachers at the school filled out a form about all their favorite things and then it was posted to the website so that all the parents could see. Listed under her favorite flowers were sunflowers, lilacs, roses and daisies. I was hoping my son could paint the cookie but again we didn't have time. It was going to be tricky because the second cookie actually had dents and cracks in it already before I started. I accidentally leaned on it when I was drawing lines on the other cookie. Doh! I made sure the entire painted cookie was in color so that the dents wouldn't be so noticeable. Of course, since I started to paint on it, I added even more dents since the cookie wasn't quite dry last night. It was a big mess really but it still looked "alright." This morning I had my son write a another message over the top to personalize it. Good enough!

Smudged cookies from packaging. Oops!

It was a quick last minute job but I think and I hope the teacher will appreciate it anyway. They're my favorite lemon vanilla sugar cookies. We also threw in a package of French Mariage Frères tea with the cookies as a gift. There were 30 individual sachets of tea in a package. Hey, if someone gave me nice French tea and custom cookies, I would love it! Hope she will too.