My Army of Gingerbread Men!

Last year for Christmas, I baked up a batch of Linzer cookies with raspberry jam for my work mates:

These came out well and were pretty yummy cause of the toasted hazelnuts in the dough. This year I decided to give gingerbread cookies another crack. A few years ago, possibly before 2002, Leslie and I decided we wanted to try making gingerbread cookies. We had no cookie cutters, no parchment, and no clue how to make frosting that hardens. It was a bit of a failure. Cookies came out fine though time consuming because we attempted to carve out each character. And it got ruined for the most part when we put our frosting (powdered sugar + water) on it and prayed it would harden instead of checking our facts.

This year, I used the Gingerbread People recipe from the Everyday Food magazine and bought real cutters, splurged on whole nutmegs, and thought of expressions to put on their faces. Speaking of nutmegs, you ever wonder what one looks like on the inside? I never though about it until I saw it, its kind of neat:

The picture on the right is the nutmeg after going through a microplane. It looked a little like sawdust but smelled great. What I forgotten about gingerbread dough was that it was sticky. We’re talking like sugar cookie and shortbread cookie dough sticky but even more so because of the molasses. I had to keep popping the dough in and out of the freezer to firm it up in between cutting and placing them on the parchment sheet. Little tip for these (as well as sugar and shortbread), roll out the dough inbetween two sheets of parchment paper and place that on your cookie sheet and into the fridge/freezer. The dough will firm up faster and be ready for cutting straight out of the fridge. Before and after the heat:

The next round of cutouts, I had a little fun with. I was tempted to get the Fred ABC cookie cutters from Amazon because they looked fun but 7.50 seemed a little steep. So to mimic the effect I used my regular cutter with a linzer cutter. Remember the first picture? Those round edges look like bite marks in the reverse. I also made smaller versions because the snackable size appealed to me. Originally I was going to make a bunch of little cookies but the sticky dough and time consuming task of cutting out smaller cookies was too much for me.

My intention was to make a crispier gingerbread cookie instead of the more cake/bread type. So before I popped them in the oven, I put the uncooked cut outs into the freezer for a few minutes before sticking them straight into the oven. The butter in the batter solidifies and won’t spread as easily when heat is applied to it in the oven. My gingerbread men got to keep their manly figure.

Now that the baking is done, the fun part starts. Decorating! What Leslie and I didn’t have in our arsenal last time was royal icing. Its a basic decorative frosting that hardens really well. Its used a lot when building gingerbread houses and other confectioneries. If you watched the FoodTV challenges, you should see or hear them mention this stuff a lot. There’s two ways of making royal icing. One recipe requires using an egg whites and that’s the traditional way to go but since I’m making these for other people, I’m not going to risk giving them salmonella. I went the other route and bought meringue powder. I used the Wilton brand and it worked out well. Though I totally spaced this morning and miscalculated the water-sugar-meringue powder ratio. My frosting set up fine but because I didn’t put enough meringue powder, some of the frosting got smooshed when I was packaging them up. I had fun giving them expressions this morning:

You’ll notice that a few of them aren’t too happy looking..

And of course, we mustn’t forget about the little ones, my army of little gingerbread ninjas.

To be honest, though these came out well, I wasn’t absolutely wild about the recipe. I think I’m going to attempt these cookies again, a recipe that’ll give me that crispier snappy crunch. These were a little cakey, not a bad thing, just not what I wanted. It’ll give me another chance to decorate again, next time I’ll use colors.