Gingerbread Men

GUEST POST!!

Eleanore has inspired me to try my hand at gingerbread. 
She has been talking about making a couple of houses recently, and I kind of like that idea! But a house!? Frankly, that’s a bit of an ambitious start for me, so I opted for gingerbread men. (Also, I prefer men over houses. ☺)

I picked this as the best (self-proclaimed) recipe. The Google seemed to back this claim up because it came back high on the search return.

I made the dough on Tuesday night before my soccer game at 11pm (ugh, but that’s another story). The directions were straight forward, except the resulting dough looked a little dry—very crumbly. I shrugged my shoulders–que sera, sera– wrapped up the dough in plastic and refrigerated it overnight.

The next day, I brought the dough back to room temperature (a couple of hours on the counter seemed to do the trick), and rolled it out. The dough was still a bit dry IMHO, but I was able to roll it out surprisingly easily after working it a bit in my hands. Full disclosure: I like easy cookies, where you just roll them into balls and don’t even have to worry about patting them down, so this was a major departure for me to have to break out the rolling pin as an extra step. If you’re the same, do not be daunted! It was simple enough.

The recipe says to bake the cookies between 7 to 10 minutes. My oven is convection, and I went for the 7 minute time because 1) I don’t like rock hard biscuits and 2) I’m highly impatient. They came out pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good!

For the icing, I mixed powdered (or icing) sugar with a bit of corn syrup (I really didn’t measure this out, sorry) and a tiny bit of water, and then coloured the icing with food colouring. I used baggies with a tiny hole snipped in one corner to pipe out the icing. I’m not the best piper, but I figured I would go all in: I tried to make some look like they were wearing military uniforms, because I was going to be shipping some to a friend stationed overseas. They don’t look professional, but I think they are obviously gingerbread men, right?

Overall, I’d say, on a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 7 in level of difficulty (it’s the decorating bit that really bumped it to this level), and for taste, about the same.