Saturday, December 10, 2011

Gingerbread Teddy Bears

I was talking to my sister the other day and told her my story about the gourmet dog biscuits.  If you haven't read about this you can read it here.  After our chuckle, she reminded me about the gingerbread cookies I made one year at Christmas time and how she enjoyed them.  I couldn't quite remember what I made so I got to searching through my recipe book to see if I could find the recipe I used.  I came up with the basic recipe but couldn't find the cookie cutter.  I went to the store and bought a new cookie cutter and started mixing up cookie dough.  It had to cool in the fridge overnight so I had time to think about the next step.  The more I thought about these cookies I made a few years ago, the more I realized they really weren't gingerbread MEN.  They were gingerbread teddy bears.  Some more digging came up with the recipe in an old Taste of Home magazine.

Today I started rolling out cookie dough and what a struggle that was.  First I used wax paper, then used the cookie cutter for the men.  That was a disaster.  The dough stuck to the wax paper and I couldn't get it off the paper and onto the pan without messing it up.  What a mess.  And, it was taking forever. 
I could only bake two men at a time.  So, I decided to forget the cookie cutter and do the teddy bears.  The instructions said to make little balls of dough and press them with your hand to make the shapes for the body, head, legs and ears.   That got messy and took forever.  I could bake three bears on the cookie sheet at a time but they were kind of fat and cake-like.  Not good.

This is what two hours of cookie making looks like.

When I looked at the dough I still had left,
I wanted to cry.   This was not working.


I finally decided to make little balls of dough, which I put on parchment paper, and flattened with a water glass.  This would give me little round gingerbread cookies and I could use up the dough and be done with it.



This worked out really well.  That's when a light bulb went off in my head.  Why not make those teddy bears using the glass method and parchment paper?  Smash those little balls down, put on the M & M's, leave on the parchment paper and bake 'em.    I finally got in a rhythm.  Rolling little balls of cookie dough, smashing them down with the glass on parchment paper and  putting on the candies.  I was able to do 9 bears on a sheet with this method.  The result was that I used all that cookie dough and came up with one heck of a pile of gingerbread cookies as seen here.
And, one last item.

I finished those socks.  WOOT-WOOT!

3 comments:

Lorri said...

I love the teddy bears! They are so cute, I may have to steal this idea. Have a great week and Happy Holidays!

Anonymous said...

Hoorah!!! looks like I can finally leave a post. The socks are wonderful,and you will find that kntting is a great pass time.... getting together today was wonderful, thanks for the gift, and it is way tooooo pretty to use so it will become a "mini" wall hanging!!!

Janet said...

The bear cookies are really very cute. I've always wanted to learn to knit socks--maybe some day.