I took this week off work, and I'm really glad I did... My schedule has been becoming more and more swamped, and until this week I still had scarecrows and ghosts up in the house! Monday I cleaned the house and got caught up on laundry, Tuesday I ended up taking clients (so much for my week off...), Wednesday I skipped the ICAN meeting AND a hair cut/color so Justin and I could get the house decorated, and I'm so glad I did because it sure feels good to mark that off my to-do list! The tree is up, the stockings are hung, the halls are decked, the front porch is strung with bows and lighted garland... I think we're covered! This may be our last Christmas in our current house, since we're planning on building at the farm this coming spring, so I wanted to make sure I went as all-out as I could!
Yesterday we took care of some Christmas shopping, and today I baked. I made cut-out "sugar" cookies and gingerbread men. The gingerbread cookies were my favorite of the two, so I'm sharing the recipe with you today!
These are super yummy, and I’m not even a real big fan of
gingerbread cookies, so I think that’s saying something! I figured I’d give them a whirl, plus a
friend of mine requested that I try making a “healthy” version because she
loves them, and I gotta say after I made these I’m a convert! I might be making these every year!
I also made them because my sister got me these cookie
cutters for Christmas one year, and I felt compelled to use them…
 |
| "Already Been Chewed" Cookies... |
I found this
recipe on Primal Palate, and I’m
glad I went with it, like I said, it’s delicious! I also found this
cinnamon frosting recipe on the same site.
I was pleased with how it turned out too! Check it out, and enjoy!
 |
| Poor little guys!! |
Gingerbread Men
·
3 cups blanched almond flour
·
1/2 cup molasses
·
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
·
3 tablespoons palm shortening or butter (I used butter since I didn’t
have palm shortening on hand)
·
1 tablespoon coconut milk or almond milk
·
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon **
·
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
·
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves **
·
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg **
·
1/2 teaspoon salt
·
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
** Note: since I don’t have ground
cloves and I’m out of nutmeg I used some of my pumpkin pie spice left over from
Thanksgiving, which has pretty much those same ingredients in it. Instead of the cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg I
used 1 1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- In a sauce pan, heat molasses to a boil.
- Add maple syrup, palm shortening or butter, and milk to sauce pan.
- Stir ingredients until combined, then remove from heat.
- In a small bowl, combine all dry ingredients.
- Pour dry ingredients into wet, and mix with a wooden spoon until batter is fully blended. It’s going to make a very wet dough, so it might be easier if you chill it before rolling it out.
- Roll out dough between two sheets of parchment paper, until about 1/4 inch thick. You’re going to want to use parchment paper, I don’t recommend rolling and cutting them directly on your countertop unless you want to use up all your almond flour to keep them from sticking.
- Cut dough with cookie cutters. I found it easiest to cut them out in the arrangement I want to bake them in (allow a good half inch or more between them so they don’t run together while baking), peel away the excess dough around the men, then transfer the parchment paper with the cookies on it over to a cookie sheet.
- Bake for 5-8 minutes, keeping an eye on them. I had to adjust my oven to 325 because the first round got a bit crispy. I tend to have that kind of luck when I’m using almond flour :-s.
- Let cool on a wire rack, decorate if you want to, and enjoy! I got about 35 cookies out of this recipe (including the crispy guys).
Cinnamon Frosting
- 1 cup palm shortening, but I used coconut butter
- 1 tablespoon raw honey
- 1 1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- Blend all ingredients with a hand mixer until fluffy.
- Use immediately, or refrigerate for up to a week.
I added a few drops of food coloring
to it - unfortunately the vanilla turns the frosting brown, so if you’ve got clear vanilla you’re good. Otherwise it
completely blends in with the color of the cookies, and the food coloring
helped. Except that it’s not
natural. Which completely goes against
the whole theme of this blog. I’m
actually having a serious battle of wills with this issue, does that make me
weird? The creative artsy side of me won
over and decided to use the color so my cookies would be pretty, and the
budding health freak side of me is very angry at the artsy side… I mean, I
turned down marshmallows for smores this fall because for some reason Kraft
decided to put Blue #4 or whatever it was in it… and they’re white… and I was
creeped out. See my conflict? :-/
I sense a blog post coming on about
WHY food coloring isn’t good for you, but I’ll save it. Until after I do some more research. And until I experiment with making my
own! Until then, I’ll cheat… but only in
small doses… I promise!
Anyway! Hope everyone has been having a great
December so far! I’ve got more great
cookie recipes coming so stay tuned!
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