Gingerbread Snowmen

Instead of our standard cutout cookies, this year I decided to make gingerbread men. After searching Walmart and the grocery for a gingerbread cookie cutter and finding none, I just decided to go with the snowman cutter I already had. I had such visions of cute little gingerbread men (now snowmen) all decked out in multi-colors of frosting. I saw on the food network how to outline in thick frosting and "flood the inside with a thinner frosting to make it look professional. I learned from the Betty Crocker cookbook that you can cut off one tip of an envelope or plastic ziploc bag for a makeshift frosting bag that you can write/draw with. I'd actually used that tip before to write on birthday cakes.

Of course nothing came out like planned, as you can see in the pic. First, I forgot to put in the baking soda when I mixed the dough - which was very thick by the way. I didn't notice this til I was already cutting out cookies. So my cookies, taste pretty good, but they are hard as rocks. When I went to frost them this morning I tried my trusty plastic bag trick to outline the snowmen and ended up with a very sticky hand because the top did not seal properly. Also that was going to take forever. I made it through outlining 2 1/2 cookies before I scraped that idea and decided to just frost them all white with my butterknife and add decorations. This also scraped the idea of making some blue, red, green frostings and 'drawing' on the decorations cause I wasn't messing with that plastic bag anymore. I did manage a few sort of cute cookies with jimmies, choc chips and red hots, but that got real tedious too - so I ended up doing a lot of the above as just frosted with a few decorations thrown on. (If you click on the picture above, you can see some of the cuter ones on the top better.) I got through the 2 dozen I plan on taking to my sis's house on Christmas Eve before I gave up. There are probably another 3 - 4 dozen left. The batch said it made 2 1/2 dozen cookies, but I got way more than twice that.

I think I will just frost the rest and skip the decorating part. You need the frosting to eat them though cause otherwise you can't get past how hard they are! Probably my whole family will just make fun of my hard cookies anyway. Live and learn, I guess - next year I won't forget the baking soda!