Gingerbread Houses

Ingredients:

*This recipe make 4 small houses

250 mL shortening
250 mL sugar
1 egg
250 mL molasses
15 mL vinegar
500 mL flour
5 mL baking soda
2 ml salt
5 mL ground ginger
5 mL ground cinnamon
5 mL ground cloves

(you may not need all of this)

* Preheat oven to 375 F or 190 C

1. Cream shortening well
2. Gradually add sugar and cream well again
3. Beat in egg, molasses, and vinegar
4. Stir together 250 mL of the flour along with the baking soda, salt, and spices
5. Gradually blend that first cup of flour and spices into the creamedd mixture and mix well.
6. Add another 250 mL of the flour gradually, blending well. Your dough should feel soft and workable so you might not have to work in all the flour.
7. Gather the dough into a ball and then flatten it into a disk and roll it out to 3mm thickness
8. Cut into the shapes you want your house to be made out of.
9. Place on parchment paper to line a cookie sheet
10. Bake for 5-6 miuntes or until hard. It will be soft when it comes out of the oven but should harden the longer it sits out.

Looking Back:
This recipe is stressful, not going to lie. My friends and I went through 2 hand mixers and we had to redo the dough 3 times. Once the mixing bit is over though, the decorating is really fun.

Spider Web Cookies

Ingredients:
375 mL flour
300 mL cocoa powder
2 mL salt
185 mL margarine
300 mL sugar
1 egg
3 mL vanilla

Royal Icing:
250 g icing sugar
2 mL cream of tartar
15 mL whip powder
50 mL water

* Preheat oven to 350 F
1.  In a large bowl, sift together flour, cocoa, salt. Set mixture aside.
2.  Use an electric mixer to cream the maegarine and sugar until fluffy.
     Beat in the egg and vanilla.
     Add flour mixture; mix on low speed until thoroughly combined.
     Divide the dough in half; wrap in plastic wrap.
     Chill for 10 minutes in the freezer.
3.  Roll the dough out between two pieces of wax paper until about 5 mm thick.
     Cut out a tracer for the web shape from scale paper.
     Cut out each cookie.
4.  Place cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 8 to 10 minutes.
5.  Cool completely on wire racks.
6.  To make royal icing whip together the icing ingredients in a medium bowl.
7.  To make the cobweb design, begin by icing cookie with white royal icing.
     To 50 mL of the icing sugar add 30 mL melted chocolate chips or use black icing paste.
8.  Pipe out a spiral of black icing starting from the center to the edges of the cookies.
9.  Draw a bamboo skewer or use the tip of a sharp knife and drag it from the center to each point of the cookie, then from the inner curves back to the center.


Looking Back:

This recipe is so stressful! The moisture content is really finicky and cutting out the spider webs is really annoying. This is a recipe for patient peopole......really patient people.