Day 10: Gingerbread Men

Day 10 of my 12 Days of Cookies: More cookies made especially for the holidays.. gingerbread men! Now, I am not a fan of molasses and most recipes for gingerbread men actually require more than 1/2 cup of molasses. The recipe that I use only has a mere 2 tablespoons of it. If you like more of a molasses flavor in your cookie, then I wouldn't recommend using this recipe. I also got too lazy to decorate these with all of the baking that I've been doing, so my cookies ended up being rather plain. You can also under bake these cookies a bit so they stay softer, or sub some white sugar with brown sugar.

You can use any royal icing recipe to decorate these cookies; You can even use frosting, if you prefer. For these cookies, I used: 1 egg white, 1 cup of powdered sugar, and about 1 tsp of vanilla. My other royal icing recipe can be found HERE, at my previous post with sugar cookies. Another helpful tip when making these is to roll out the dough between two pieces of parchment or wax paper. It makes such a less of a mess!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter, softened
• 1 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons molasses
• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Cream butter and sugar. Add egg, mix well. Mix in molasses. Add flour, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, & salt, mixing til well combined. Chill dough for at least 2 hours.
2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease cookies sheets. On a lightly floured surface, roll dough to 1/4" thick. Cut into desired shapes, place inch apart on cookies sheets.
3. Bake for 9-10 minutes.