Let the Force be With You this Holiday Season!

Yes, it's Princess Leia in gingerbread.

Let me explain.  It is that time of year, when I spend a good deal of time focusing on a major art project, knowing that the results will all be eaten within a little more than a week's time.  I broke out the cookie cutters (I even bought a couple of new ones), got out my husband's mother's gingerbread recipe, and turned our kitchen into a gingerbread cookie factory. After more than 7 hours of decorating over 7 dozen cookies, the cookies are done.  Before baking, I cut some windows out of some of the houses.  I didn't know what to do with the leftover teeny hunks of dough, so I baked them.  When the cookies had baked, it was obvious that a couple of the hunks of dough looked just like Princess Leia's hairdo, so with a little royal icing, Leia became a gingerbread reality!  Another lump became the blond beehive (below right) and a weird-shaped piece became my favorite, the crazy orange hairdo on the left.

The windows were cut out of some of these houses and also out of the train locomotive.  It's hard to see in the photos, but crunched up Life Savers were baked into the openings, and they melt and harden into little stained glass windows!

The train, by the way, is made from some new cookie cutters that I purchased on a whim.  It's my first time using the cutters and I rather like the result. 

My other new cookie cutter is a snowflake.  I went gung-ho with blue and white icing and sugar sprinkles, and they are so very elegant-looking next to the ridiculousness of most of my other cookie decorations. (Note below, with the snowflakes, a couple of little green alien men and what we fondly call the "diaper-babies".) 

I also used the snowflake cutter a week ago while making Hanukkah cookies.

I have a giant gingerbread man cookie cutter I used to make the three dudes below.

Below are the more 'usual' size gingerbread menfolk.  Note the kid with the curly red hair - his hair is also an add-on of an extra hunk of dough.  The shape of the dough could also have become an awesome football helmet, now that I think about it.  Oh well, maybe next year I'll decorate with professions - football players, doctors, ballerinas, explorers, teachers, artists, pirates, firemen...  Ooh I really like this idea!

And here's all the womenfolk.  The white bun on the gal in the bottom row is also a dough add-on. 

My small 'boy' cutter can be turned upside down for cute reindeer faces, as well as the little boys.  By the time I got to decorating the boys, I was out of patience and time.  I have no idea why the baby on the upper left appears to be wearing a diaper made out of a double-ended carrot.  It definitely wasn't intentional!

Below are a few more houses, a couple of feet, and hands posed in the Vulcan salute. (We need to be sure to give equal exposure to both Star Wars and Star Trek!)

Let the Force be With You, and Live Long and Prosper!  

 Thanks for stopping for a visit.  I hope you have some artsy things planned for this holiday season!  If you would like to see last year's gingerbread ridiculousness, including a gal in a polka dot bikini, you can check out the last year's post about them, HERE.

A Gingerbread Interlude

Our holidays are filled with artsy endeavors! One of my favorites is making and decorating gingerbread cookies for my husband and his family.  The recipe is my husband's, long ago given him by his mother.  When he first introduced them to me, he was a gingerbread purist - he believed that they should have raisins for eyes and buttons, and that's it. 

He should have known that if I was going to make these cookies, that I could not leave them simply with raisin eyes.  He also should have known I wouldn't be happy simply making gingerbread BOYS, as you can see by the tray of gingerbread ladies above.  So nowadays, he just leaves the kitchen and tries not to come back until I'm done decorating.  I don't think he even cares for the the taste of frosting, but to me, gingerbread is nothing if not an art project. 

 And of course, there's the fact that I'm Jewish, and that the first night of Hanukkah is on Christmas Eve this year.  So I made some Chanukah cookies too.  (By the way, you might notice I used two different spellings for Hanukkah.  That's because it is a Hebrew word.  I grew up with the 'Chanukah' spelling, but the 'Hanukkah' spelling is the most popular/accepted right now.) 

 This year, my husband insisted that I always make a double recipe.  I foolishly believed him, and about 10 dozen cookies later, I was seriously overloaded.  To move things along, I made 5 of the giant boys, pictured below, and on the top right of this post.  Usually I only make two of them because they use up so much dough.

I also made a batch of these silly reindeer.

And of course there's the standard size gingerbread boys.

When I had been decorating cookies for many hours, I started getting silly and started putting them in bikinis (such as the one pictured at the top of the post and on the tray above) or underwear (also on the tray above), and also making 'diaper babies' (pictured below) and aliens (below) out of the smaller gingerbread boy cookie cutters.

You may notice a hand on the tray above, too.  My attempt was to put the fingers in the Vulcan salute, that means "Live Long and Prosper".  I also made a number of little houses, and this year I cut out the windows and melted Life Savers and Jolly Ranchers in them to look like colored glass.  It was my first attempt at this, and it worked so well, I started cutting out everything in sight, including a heart out of the chest of the big boy at the top of the post. The photo below is some of the houses.  I neglected to get good pics before they got packed away. 

And I'll close with a few close-ups.  Next year, it's back to baking a single batch of gingerbread, unless I suddenly have a lot of help getting it all done.

 Happy Holidays, everyone!!!