On the Third Day of Christmas...

I baked and decorated GINGERBREAD MEN. Okay so I have to admit that I took a few little shortcuts... which is somewhat unusual for me. My specialty is normally homemade baked goods. These turned out so well that I really don't think that anyone will know this was not my recipe! I went to the grocery store and bought a roll of Pillsbury Refrigerated Gingerbread Cookie Dough. I just tried one, and they taste really yummy! I might never make gingerbread homemade again after tasting these.

I used this cookie cutter from Wilton. The cookies turn out very broad so you have plenty of room for decorating. And even though it is a gingerbread "man," I put dresses on them and turned them into girls too.

This was one of biggest experiments in this cookie project. I usually use a piping bag with royal icing, but I ran across this at Michael's the other day and decided to give it a whirl. Think of your kindergarten glue bottle, and this is what the packaging is like for the icing. Once you have iced the cookies, this icing gives a nice sheen and dries somewhat hard. The only problem that I found was that the tip is a little wide to be making extremely accurate designs. For example, making perfectly similar dots for the eyes was difficult. But, overall I would use this icing again. It is nice being able to throw the mess away after you are done! I think that kids would really love to decorate with this icing. We used white icing, but I also saw that they carried red and green.

Here are some up close pictures of the ones I made (all the girls are much cuter than the boys!)...


I am taking these cookies over to the party tonight. Still hoping that the weather holds out, since it randomly started snowing earlier. We are expecting about 30 people, and probably have enough sweets to feed 100. I have got to go finish getting ready! Can't wait for you to see tomorrow's post!