Is there anything more whimsical or festive than iced gingerbread?

Anyway, the other day my daughter-in-law confessed that she tried to make gingerbread last year but that her attempt ended in disaster.  So, she came by the house this weekend (bringing my granddaughter with her) and we baked cookies.  She told me that my dough recipe was “way better” than the dough she used last year.  So I thought I would share it,  along with some photos of the cookies we baked and decorated.

I have to admit this gingerbread recipe is not an old family secret — it came out of a holiday magazine I bought twenty years ago.  And it’s never failed me.  You’ll find the dough this makes is easy to roll and cut.

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Cookie Dough Recipe

Ingredients:

4 cups flour
1 tablespoon coco unsweetened coco powder
1 tablespoon ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cloves
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 sticks of unsalted butter, softened
(do not use margarine — the cookie dough will not roll as well.  And let’s face it if you’re going to all the trouble of baking cookies from scratch, use butter — Christmas comes only once a year)
1 cup superfine sugar (using superfine sugar makes the process of creaming the butter and sugar so much easier)
1 egg at room temperature
1/2 cup unsulphured molasses

Cooking instructions:

1.  Whisk the dry ingredients together and set aside.

2.  In your mixer cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

3.  Add the egg and beat thoroughly.

4.  Beat in the molasses

5.  Gradually, on low speed, beat in the dry mixture.  Depending on your mixer, you may have to hand beat the last little bit of dough because it will get thick and heavy.  You know you’re done when the dough makes a nice ball.

6.  Cut the dough into quarters,  form each quarter into a flat disc like a hamburger pattie, and then refrigerate.  It’s best to refrigerate several hours or overnight.  Don’t skimp on the refrigeration time.

7.  Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

8.  Roll the chilled dough with a rolling pin on a lightly floured surface.  The dough should be thinner than 1/4 inch but thicker than 1/8 inch before you cut the cookies.  You may find that dough directly out of the refrigerator is too cold to properly roll.  Let it warm up a little bit, but make sure it’s still cool while you are rolling it out.  The dough will tear while rolling, but you can pinch it back together around the circumference.

9.  Cut the dough with your cutters and transfer the cut cookies to an ungreased cookie sheet.   (Hint — a think flexible spatula will be very helpful in getting the cookies onto the baking sheet.

10.  Cook in the oven for about 8-9 minutes.  Remove the cooks from the sheet and place on a rack to cool for about 4 minutes.

Cookies as they come out of the oven

Icing Recipe

Gingerbread cookies are meant to be decorated and iced.  That is, quite frankly, the fun part.  So here is a great icing recipe that creates an icing that you can apply using paintbrushes.  I cannot tell you how much fun the kids have painting clothes on gingerbread men and women.

Ingredients

1 box of confectioners sugar (1 lb)
1/2 cup water
2 egg whites
1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice

Combine the sugar water and egg whites in an electric mixer and beat until the icing is thick and glossy. Divide the icing into smaller containers and use food coloring to get a large variety of colors.

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Painting clothes on gingerbread ladies is the most fun part

Please let me know if you try this recipe.  I’d love to hear from you.  I can’t tell you how many years of fun I’ve had in the kitchen making these cookies with my kids.  And pretty soon my grandchild will be old enough to get in on the fun too.  I can’t wait for that.

Congratulations to Nikki Wight the grand prize winner.  Nikki will receive $50 in gift certificates from Amazon.com, as well as a bound copy of Small Town Christmas and autographed copies of my books and Katie Lane’s books.

But . . . drum roll please . . .

We have three runners-up all of whom will be receiving bound copies of Small Town Christmas.  They are:

Pat Hollenbeck
Lisa Hutson, and
Kim Matlock

Thanks, everyone, for entering our Christmas giveaway.  And may all of you have a happy and bright holiday season.

When it comes to Thanksgiving, I am thankful for gravy – and the generations of women who handed down the art of gravy making so that I could share it with you.

I learned how to make gravy from my mother’s two older sisters:  Aunt Doss and Aunt Annie.  Mom, who came from the same gene pool, could not make decent gravy to save her soul, but, ironically, Mom is the one who taught Aunt Doss and Aunt Annie how to make gravy.  She accomplished this feat even though she had never made gravy in her life.

How, you ask?

Picture a small farmhouse in rural South Carolina around 1929.  My grandmother had just passed away and Aunt Annie had returned from Winthrop College and Aunt Doss from the big city to help keep their father’s home and to look after their little sister (Mom) who was just barely 12 at the time.  Mom was sick with the mumps.  Bedridden.

Aunts Annie and Doss were making dinner and decided that the chicken needed gravy, but neither one of them had a clue.  So, Doss and Annie asked Mom if she had any ideas, and Mom was just chock full of ideas, gleaned from years of watching her mother make gravy.  Mom had never ever made gravy, either.

So, as the story goes, Mom hollered the precise step-by-step instructions for gravy making from her sick bed.  Her sisters followed the instructions and, voila, gravy was made to everyone’s satisfaction.  (Along with a family story that has been told, now for eighty-one years, and which will continue being told for a while, yet.)

Flash forward several decades to a kitchen in New York.  (Annie and Mom both moved to New York in the 1930s).  Aunt Annie always came for Thanksgiving dinner, and Mom always ceded the kitchen to her so that the good gravy could be made since Mom really had no gift for gravy making, except her ability to teach.  By the 1960s, I was required to watch and learn the entire process.  This was, Annie said, because a person could learn a lot by watching.  She would then proceed to tell the story of how Mom learned to make gravy by watching her mother.

So I watched and learned.

And now I make the gravy every Thanksgiving, and pass along the story of Mom hollering the instructions down the hall from her sickbed to my own kids.  Last year, on Thanksgiving Day, my daughter called me from Chicago.  She made me dictate the step-by-step instructions for gravy making over the phone.  I guess that’s the modern-day equivalent of hollering down the hall.  But, I can feel good about the fact that another generation has learned the art of gravy making.

I loved Mom and Aunt Doss and Aunt Annie with all my heart.  Those three ladies are never far from my mind even though they have all been gone for many years, now.  The gravy lives on and I am ever thankful for that.

So, here are the step-by-step instructions for making gravy that Mom hollered to her sisters so many years ago:

Step 1:  Take the giblets and neck from the bird and put them in a saucepan and cover them with water.  Put them on a low simmer.  The stock you make will become the body of the gravy, so if you have a big crowd, be sure to make a lot of stock.  You can put onions or carrots or other flavorings in the pot if you like.  Cover the saucepan and simmer all day — for as long as you cook the turkey.

Step 2:  When the bird is about ready to come out of the oven, strain the stock though a strainer and remove the neck and giblets.  If you like giblets in your gravy, dice up the liver and heart and return them to the stock, otherwise, discard everything and pour the stock in a liquid measuring cup so you know how many cups of stock you’ve got.

Step 3:  When the bird comes out of the oven, remove it to a cutting board and let it stand before carving.  For each cup of stock you’ll need two tablespoons of the turkey drippings from the bottom of the pan.  Make sure they are heavy on the grease.  The grease is what keeps the gravy from getting lumpy.  (It’s also why cardiologists have put gravy on that list of foods that you are better off not eating — but what do cardiologist know.)

Step 4:  Put the grease in a large frying pan (cast iron is best) and turn up the heat to high.  For each tablespoon of grease put in two tablespoons of flour.  No sifting required.

Step 5:  This is the most important step.  You must cook the roux created by the grease and flour, stirring constantly, until it is very brown, almost burned.  It will undoubtedly stick to the bottom of the pan, but have no fear.  The trick to making gravy is to be utterly fearless when it comes to browning the roux.  If you chicken out, your gravy will not be brown.  This is the place where my mother always failed in her gravy making.  Mom’s gravy was never brown.  She would cheat and put soy sauce in it.  Annie, on the other hand, would cook that roux until it looked almost burned and come up with amazing gravy every time.

Step 6:  When the roux is dark brown, pour the stock into the frying pan.  You should have a very long spoon when you do this, and stand back, because the stock hitting the hot skillet will make a big whoosh of steam.

Step 7:  Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the gravy is thick — about 10 minutes or so.

Not too long ago during approach into Baltimore on a beautiful clear autumn day,  I got an eagle’s view of the fall foliage colors.  And yet, the thing that impressed me most from that high place was not the oranges, or the reds, or the goldens.  No, oddly, it was the evergreens.

From my view out the window I could clearly see the way the wind blows.  How the seeds of pines and other evergreens grow stands, that reach like fingers down from the tops of mountains.  The greens on that autumn day impressed me.

And made me think of this winter song entitled “Green” by Peter Mayer, one of my favorite singer-songwriters.  Here’s a YouTube link, because I’m too dumb to get my blog to embed the video. 

I’m talking about the transmission for a 1982 Fiat Spyder Convertible.

This is the price you pay for marrying a Georgia boy who is also a shade tree mechanic.  The tranny has been sitting in my kitchen for at least nine months.  There is a radiator in the downstairs den, and a floorboard in my husband’s office.

When I married this man 34 years ago, he moved into my one bedroom apartment and stashed Triumph Spitfire parts in the walk-in closet.  For some women the reality of marriage hits when they discover that their husbands don’t put the cap on the toothpaste.  For me — it’s grease in the kitchen sink, and I’m not talking about vegetable oil.

Good thing there are fringe benefits.

My hero and heroine needed to go on a date and it had to be holiday themed.  Also, I wanted to inject a little humor into the story, because the book has been far more emotional that I had originally planned.  So I wracked my brain for fun Christmassy things that my hero and heroine could do,  and every idea sounded like something right from the Hallmark Channel.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Hallmark, but I wanted something funny not sweet.  The book is filled with sweet, poignant moments.  I needed a few belly laughs.

Sometimes writing humor can be a bitch.  So I called my friend, Carla.

Carla always gives me funny ideas.  I have no idea how she does this because she never tries to be funny.  But she’s golden and I’m not sharing her with anyone.

“Help,” I said, “I need a Christmas-themed date that isn’t saccharine sweet.”

“Hmmm,” she said, mulling things over.  ” They could always go on a drive to see the Christmas lights, and then they could park somewhere and get it on.”

Bwahahahahahahahah……

“That’s not funny,”  Carla said.

I gasped and dried my steaming eyes.  “Maybe not in the big city where you live, but in Last Chance, South Carolina Old Man Nelson puts up a humdinger of a light show in his corn field. ”

I had just made this up of course, but my fertile mind was already spinning all kinds of humorous scenarios.  Because, well, Henry Nelson is a hillbilly who enjoys riling up the church ladies of Last Chance.

I suddenly saw an image of a a big University of South Carolina themed Christmas tree with garlands flashing the words “Go Cocks,” in all directions as far as the eye can see.

And then I imagined a group of tipsy elves making moonshine in the copper still Henry Nelson inherited from his granddaddy.

And, once again, Carla had put me on the right track.  I thanked her profusely and went off looking for more tacky Christmas ideas.

And I found this:

You know, sometimes reality is tackier than anything I could make up.

So what’s the tackiest holiday decoration you ever saw?  Please, by all means, post links to photos.

Louise Zenefsky

and

Carol Luciano

  Last Chance Beauty Queen will be available in bookstores on on February 1, 2011.

I am so thrilled to be a part of a new e-book Christmas anthology that will be available on November 1.  The Title is Small Town Christmas.  And my story “I’ll be Home for Christmas” is one of three heart-warming stories in the collection.  I’m joined by New York Times bestselling author, Jill Shalvis and Katie Lane.  I know you’re going to love all of these stories.  For more information check my books section.