Why, hello December! It seems like  you just started yesterday, and here we are, already in the middle of the month 😮 Time sure is flying around here, is it like this everywhere?! We are pretty busy around here lately, especially with holiday things (we are hosting dinner for 8 this year on Christmas eve, yay!!!) and also trying to figure out all the things we need for the apartment for when our friends and family come to visit.

It has been a long time since I wanted to bake gingerbread cookies. In Brazil we don’t have this kind of tradition, I only remember eating them when I was a child, living in the US. But gladly, we moved to a country where there are big Christmas traditions that we like, and one of them is baking cookies! I bought a few Christmas cookie cutters last month, and couldn’t wait to use them. I decided to try my luck two Sundays ago with this recipe. You already know how I get nervous baking sweets, and since it was my first time making this cookie, I sure thought that something was going to go wrong….I’ll explain with the photos…hahahaha

First of all (I am a little ashamed of saying this), I always try to find an english recipe to follow. When I try to make something using a recipe that is in german, I tend to struggle a lot with the directions. Sometimes I try to translate, but most of the times things just doesn’t make sense in english or portuguese. And of course I also struggle with recipes from another country, because ingredients change from one place to another. For example, brown sugar and molasses, it’s the second time that I bought brown sugar here, and I’ve never seen the option light or dark. Maybe it exists, just not in the supermarkets near my home. The other issue was molasses, I was almost 100% sure that I wasn’t going to find it…hahahha first I tried the “bio”section, nothing there. Then, I tried looking for it in the honey section…you never know…what to do you say, I found it! I wasn’t sure it was molasses, because I didn’t know the right name in german, but it looked so similar, so I decided to buy it! As soon as I got home, I translated the name of the product and discovered that it was beet sugar, I tasted it, and it was just like molasses…hoorayyyy!!!

This part of the recipe was simple. I don’t have an electric mixer, but it was easy doing it by hand.

Every time I look at this picture, I remember of Chandler…doodies! doodies…poo….hahahaha! But seriously, this part I got pretty scared, I thought that the dough was too soft. I wasn’t sure if two hours of refrigerating would be enough, but thank God I was totally wrong!

Rolling the dough was also easy, and then you just have to figure out the puzzle 🙂

Poor gingerbread man, came out of the oven with almost half of his body burnt…ha! I totally blame the oven..hahaha What do you know…they came out just perfect!

Now for the decorating part! I also had a little trouble finding white icing…I found brown ones, and there was this other thing that resembled white icing, but I wasn’t sure, so I decided to buy these colourful “sugar pens”.

We had a lot of fun decorating them as you can see on the pictures below…hahaha

To tell you the truth, we had more fun decorating, than eating them….hahaha maybe I’m just not a big cookie person. But I still want to make sugar cookies and see how they taste, maybe they’ll be better!

What are your baking traditions for the holidays??

xx