Milk & Cookies

Okay, I have been really craving sweets so I bought some baking chocolate and was going to make brownies this weekend. But we ran out of eggs! D’oh! Instead, I remembered that we had some leftover gingerbread dough in the freezer from Christmas AND still had that fresh ginger from the past two cookie recipes. Ginger lasts for a really long time in the fridge. So I decided to make the gingerbread cookies, adding some fresh ginger and some extra spices for more flavor.

I was also excited that I baked these during the day so there was some natural light for the photography. I discovered a secret of some of the food blogs out there – they use special, expensive flashes instead of the one that comes on their camera. I always wondered about that… most people cook at night but the cooking blogs have these beautiful pictures that look like they are naturally lit. Anyways, this blog let me in on the secret. For now I am stuck with natural light (and not much of it) or the regular flash.

Chopped ginger

First, I defrosted the dough and let it come to almost room temperature so it was roll-able. Meanwhile I chopped the ginger, watched some winter olympics (biathlon!), took a shower, and took some pictures of my cats. Some of these steps are optional – use your judgement.

Maya, the photogenic one

Once the dough was  ready, I rolled it out a little and carefully measured a pinch of nutmeg, a pinch of cloves, and 2 pinches of cinnamon onto the dough. Then I added the fresh ginger and kneaded it all together a few times.

That looks about right

Then I rolled out the dough and cut out some shapes. I made some hearts, a dog, 2 cats, a flower, a moon, the state of California… then by the end I got tired of the shapes and made Colorado, Wyoming, and some coastal states that might have existed had we drawn the lines differently. One of them looks like Kentucky but that was an accident. Then instead of frosting I pressed each one into a pile of sugar and baked them for 7 minutes at 350 F.

There's Wyoming in the middle, and part of Kentucky in the bottom left

Then I ate them and ruined my dinner.

Cookie cutting without cookie cutters

Along with rum balls, we made gingerbread cookies with icing! We used Paula Deen’s gingerbread recipe. The flavor was okay but not great, I thought it was too molasses-ey and not enough ginger-ey. Thusly, I won’t describe the cookie recipe in detail.

The fabulous part about these cookies was our total lack of cookie cutters, forcing us to use our own ingenuity to make cookie shapes. I think we did quite well. Here are some of our ideas:

• We used a snowman head-shaped measuring cup to make snowman head-shaped cookies!
• A champagne glass to make round (ball, ornament) shaped cookies
• For the rest, a knife – some good shapes were stars, christmas trees and probably the winner of the creativity contest, Johnny 5.

Assorted

Johnny 5, or as I sometimes call him due to my 80's-specific cultural ignorance, Jackson 5