Making Gingerbread Men

Today’s activity advent adventure was to make and decorate gingerbread men—sounds a lot like gingerbread houses, but we chose to do chocolate gingerbread, for one, and then opted to decorate exclusively with frosting, no candy this time. I’ve actually spent a lot of time expressing how much I loathe rolling out dough and cutting cookies, going to the extremes of hyperbole to express what I’d rather do than make cut-out cookies, but, in truth, IT WASN’T THAT BAD. So I take back everything I’ve ever said about it. It was even kind of fun (she says sheepishly), though maybe only because the cookies got thicker and thicker with every batch, which means I probably unconsciously cut my labor by a third.

On an unrelated note: I LOVE MY MIXER. Few things (by ‘things’ I really do mean inanimate objects) are bringing me as much joy this month as my beloved Kitchen-Aid. What a breeze it is to whip up several batches of cookies and finicky frosting like royal icing. Thank you, Ebay, for helping to make my mixing dream come true. SO, here we are making the dough, which was, I confess, entirely TOO snackable.

  

And….the requisite shot of the chocolate-faced kid. Chris is all: “when are you going to stop doing that? oh, here’s his face covered in chocolate! and here’s his face covered in spaghetti sauce! and here’s his face covered in XX…!” When it stops being funny to me, I guess. Or when Sawyer becomes self-aware enough to notice that he has chocolate all over his face and therefore becomes less messy, which will be kind of a tragic hallmark of adulthood.

 

While S napped I did the aforementioned rolling and cutting…

…and baking.

  

Now we’re all suited up with our bags of colored royal icing. Sawyer was making a hell of a mess of my icing bags until I had the idea to put a rubber band around each one at the top of the icing bulb.

He started with minimalist technique—monochromatic, simple squiggles.

And then he became possessed by the sheer joy of squirting colorful sugar-ooze over everything in sight, and adopted a more expressionistic tactic.

Things went downhill from expressionism to what I’m calling “wide-scale botched autopsy.”

  

Here are all my little guys, dressed in technicolor duds. See if you can find the one in the leisure suit and the one with the hippy shawl.

 

GUUUUUUTS.