Demented Gingerbread Men

Okay....so I took it a step up from the Toll House Sugar Cookie bucket-o-dough to making my own dough: Gingerbread Cookie Dough. My mom's recipe. Mom warned me of the approaching dilema with these holiday goodies....

"Gingerbread dough is really sticky (molasses) so you need a lot of flour, but not a lot of flour."

What does THAT mean?

"You'll see."

Grrr....

It means there's a reason why you can't buy Toll House Gingerbread Cookie dough in a bucket.

End result...I probably used too much flour. My Gingerbread cookies are more "cakey" than the typical/traditional crunchy "coffee dunkers" of Gingerbread Men. But that was not the problem that ultimately saddened me.

It was in the decorating.

If I could have colored my cookies in Adobe Illustrator I would have been better off. As a graphic designer by trade, I LOVE having precision in my artwork.....which has fashioned me happily into an enormous creative control freak. I desperately tried to recreate the cookies I see in fancy suburban bakeries, the ones that are part of "Christmas Cookie Bouquets". Perfect Gingerbread Men with sticks up their butts and surrounded by green and red tissue paper faned out like a seasonal peacock.

In fact, I originally thought that I could just "buy" a dozen or so of THOSE cookies, and pass them off as my own. However, my character flaw of pure honesty once confronted would surface as my mother-in-law Carol would ask on Christmas Day in her sweet Tennessee accent if these were "homemade". Busted.

If you call this cheating....I did buy the cans of colored frosting with various "tips". They suck.

Frosting came out of those cans SUPER FAST....then.....SUPER SLOW....they would ultimately BURB or FART and a GIANT WAD of colored goo would shoot out when attempting a button or a smiley face. EFFFER!!!!!

And I THOUGHT I let them dry....3 hours on the rack. Isn't that enough time? Apparently not. Once stacked, they melted....no....rather FUSSED together like a pack of crayons in the back window of a car in the burning Arizona sun.

A large, circular Tupperware full of demented Gingerbread Mr. Bills.....stacked together into a sticky gay dogpile of sugary gooey crumble sits on top of my refrigerator.

Crap.

They taste okay. After all the work I put into them I honestly can't truly tell. Eric will eat anything so he is not a good judge. After all....he ate my burnt lasagna.