Gingerbread Cookies

The holidays are coming and that means gingerbread.

This weekend I'm having my Creative Memories Holiday Open House and I like to serve gingerbread snowflakes and Hot Cider, or Wassail. I'll post the cider recipe tomorrow, but today I'm all about the gingerbread.

Gingerbread is really very easy to make. Well at least if you have a standing mixer. If you don't, you'll need a gorilla, or at the very least some friends to help combine the ingredients for this very dense dough.

I made gingerbread for years before I got my Kitchen Aid mixer, and I have to tell you, I will never go back. I remember clearly how tired my arms got, and how I would beg Peanut Head to take a shift for me. It's that dense.

Other than the dense dough, it's a lot like making sugar cookies. You can decorate them any way you like.

I used to spend days, literally, carefully decorating gingerbread men and women. My favorite outfit, while living in California anyway, were little beach shorts for the boy gingerbread men and hot little bikini numbers for the girls.

Throughout my years of making gingerbread people, I learned early on to supervise Peanut Head. Otherwise I would end up with anatomically exaggerated gingerbread people. He's always getting into trouble like that.

These days I take the easy way out and just make snowflakes. The biggest reason is that they don't take three days to decorate. I just pipe a little white, canned, frosting onto them and sprinkle them with powdered sugar.

Surprisingly, people still eat them. I think you might like them too.

And you know I wouldn't forget your recipe card. Enjoy!