Christmas cooking begins

Now that we’re well into December, I think it’s safe to start taking about Christmas and sending out Christmas greetings and wishes.

Our Christmas tree is up again…

And over the weekend, as the picture below illustrates I’ve launched into baking-frenzy mode…

Hubby found the assortment of little gingerbread men too cute for words... no words required anyway, he just popped one of these babies into his tummy.

This is the recipe I used

The gingerbread cookie dough is not difficult to make. The most time consuming part for me was cutting out the gingerbread men shapes. Although I had a cookie cutter, the warm weather made the cookie dough turn soft and oily very quickly, so I had to refrigerate the dough in between 'rolls' before I cut out another batch of cookies.

The part I enjoyed most was decorating the little men. I said to hubby that I wish I could get all the little men pre-shaped and pre-baked so I could just focus solely on decorating an endless array of the little men.

Hubby's contribution to the process was 'eye power' and 'backseat driver'... he perched himself on one of the stools by the kitchen counter to observe and provide directions now how to better control the speed and precision of my piping technique to get more even lines. I didn't need all that so I waved him off. Then he helped himself to the big jar of an earlier batch of gingerbread and parked himself in front of the TV. After munching down three men, I warned him not to finish all the Christmas cookies before it was even Christmas...

He was like "So are these Christmas cookies like Chinese New Year cookies? Specially made only for festive seasons?" I never thought of it that way, but it was kind of an interesting question. I suppose the answer is "Yes"

Hubby was very impressed with gingerbread men and remarked how great it would be next time to have our kids in the kitchen helping to decorate cookies together. A mental image of a cookie dough covered kitchen, kids and me with gobs of icing dripping everywhere flashed through my mind. But I'll worry about that part of parenting much later.