Not My Grandma's Gingerbread Cookies

Our favourite line up.

Yesterday I made some gingerbread cookies. And this morning Saty and I worked on decorating the cookies. It's our first trial batch made for Saty's colleagues and they tasted good even if the taste of ginger was not so strong.

First few trials..

Not My Grandma's Gingerbread Cookie

4 cups cookie flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

3 teaspoons powdered ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon nutmeg

2 teaspoon mixed spice

1 cup shortening

1 cup granulated sugar

1 1/4 cups molasses

2 eggs, beaten

1. Preheat oven to 375 F. Thoroughly mix flour, soda, salt and spices.

2. Melt shortening in a saucepan. cool it slightly before adding the sugar, molasses and eggs into it. Mix them well.

3. Add 4 cups of dry ingredients and knead it to make a firm dough. Add more flour if necessary.

4. Like all other regular cookies, roll the cookie dough to 1/4 inch thick and cut the shapes out using cookie cutter.

5. Bake 10-15 minutes.

Various dots..

We decorated the cookies with royal icing. Here, we used two types; soft peak consistency for lining out the design and runny type royal icing for filling up/coloring the design.

Broken heart, checked heart.

Royal Icing

3 tablespoons meringue powder

4 cups confectioners' sugar

6 tablespoons water

1. Beat all ingredients at low speed for 7-10 minutes until icing forms peaks. This made the soft peak consistency.

2. To make them runny, in order to fill up the border, add 2 tablespoons more water to the already soft icing.

Tux and evening gown..

Overall, we are both happy with these cookies. Later we'll pack them up in individual plastics and tie them up with ribbons.

Lemon Cream Cupcake Gone Wrong

Last week, we made some cupcakes. We planned to had them filled with lemon cream cheese and made some fillings for that purpose. I used a different method of filling; I first filled quarter of the papercups with the cake batter, scooped the filling and put it in the middle, then filled the rest with cake batter up to 3/4 cup full. They were then baked.

Saty wanted the cakes to be covered with fondant icing, so we made some liquid fondant and also some royal icing for piping details on the fondant topped cakes later.

The Mistaken Line Up

And the result? Hahah..The cakes tasted alright and the lemon cream filling is delicious, only that I've placed them too little on each cake. The poured fondant looks great but tasted funny, most probably because of the almond extract I put in. The design wasn't so bad though.

The Mistaken

I won't publish the recipe this time, not until I've got them right and perfect.

The best among the worst..