My brother and his fiance are expecting a baby in september, I was asked to help organise the baby shower. My food contribution was to make some decorated gingerbread babies.
Three days before the big day, I started to panic. SOOOO much to do!! I waited till Jbaby was in bed for the night and then renewed my relationship with my beloved Kitchen Aid, mixing up the gingerbread dough. I needed around 150 biscuits, so I made up 3 batches. During the mixing of batch no.2 I realised I had run out of ginger, oops! So one batch became honey spice instead. gotta love the improvisation!
All three batches were wrapped in plastic and chucked in the fridge, a rather bad idea I realised the next day when trying to soften the now rock hard lumps of cookie dough.
I managed eventually and in one night cut and baked 50 odd gingerbread babies, 50 odd next size up ginger bread men and 50 odd hearts. All now just waiting to be iced.
The next night I started my production line of icing, first outlining and then flooding the biscuits with white royal icing, I had spent most of that day trawling the net, looking for inspiration on design ideas and came across so many wonderful (mostly American) sites all about icing and decorating cookies. The best thing I found was a recipe for the royal icing using egg white powder or meringue powder (known here as "pavlova magic") I went out and bought some and gee, I was impressed!
I iced all of these using either baking paper cones or small freezer bags as my piping bags, I eventually enlisted the help of the Jman and my parents to have the biscuits all ready by the Sunday afternoon. My father got quite carried away with the decorating and even at one point made some "mardi gras" ones, with studded briefs and o's for mouths (hope no one was offended!!)
I spent a good half hour Sunday morning packaging up the bickys in little cello parcels with ribbon, forgot to take a pic of the finished products though (D'OH!!)
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