G for Giant gingerbread kids

I’m not sure if we ever made this recipe before. I think we had, but I cannot remember exactly. I do know that we made gingerbread people in the past though so there is a good chance we have used this recipe.


it was an easy enough recipe to make, basically just mix it all together. one thing it said to do that I don’t remember ever doing was roll the dough out on a kitchen towel, at first I was like “What?” but I went ahead and did it because it told me too, I found that it really did make it easier to lift the cookies off the counter.


I wasn’t a huge fan of my cookie cutter, the arms were too thin so they kept breaking off and I would have to push it back together with hopes that it wouldn’t separate while cooking. I tried using a knife to gently ease it out and while it worked most of the time I still lost a few arms. I really miss our gingerbread cookie cutter I had as a kid with its fat arms and legs that never broke off. it may have looked more simple but its was actually a cuter cookie with less problems then my more modern cookie cutter.


the recipe called for the cookies to be decorated with raisons or currents, even though in the picture in the book it appears to decorated with chocolate candies. so I went with the directions using raisons.
the funny thing is the raisons were so large they took up most of the poor ginger kids face, I tried to so through and pick out the smallest raisons before deciding to simply cut the raisons in half. which worked much better.
my cookie cutter must be smaller then what they called for because it made several more cookies then they said but that was okay. they said it would make 11 cookies with a 5” cutter I have no idea what size mine is its bigger then they rest of my cutters though so I thought it would make about a dozen it made 16.


the flavor was nice when they were warm but even better when cooled they had a good ginger flavor and I liked the amount of molasses in them.
my decorating skills leave a bit to be desired but I figure it doesn’t really matter what they look like as long as they taste good. which they did and they only got better as the days went on. at least until day 3 then they were all gone, but I bet they would have tasted good up to a week later.

F for Fudge Brownies

these were actually really good! not that I doubted it for a second that they wouldn’t be. but this is one of the recipes I had not made before.

my niece was over and all for helping me make this latest recipe. its always a lot of fun to make things with another person. we have a pretty good system for baking together since we have been doing it for quite a few years now.
this recipe was a slightly more complicated brownie recipe then I usually make. it had us melt chocolate chips into butter. they said to do it in a pan on the stove top, but I know Chocolate can be a bit on the persnickety side when it comes to melting. I didn’t want to over melt it and have the chocolate get that strange grainy bits in it so I took the liberty of using the double boiler method which is a slower but more precise method.
my niece really liked this way of doing it. I let her do the stirring while the chips melted.


when they finished I again made her wait till they cooled a bit, though not as long as when we made the Chocolate chip cookies. because warm Brownies are pretty much awesome.
they turned out to be very rich and extremely chocolately.


and for a final touch of course we had to add the ice cream. which just about put it into desert overload. I mean overload in a good way of course..