Christmas gingerbread men... and santas... and cows!

Last Christmas my friend BakingAddict gave me this book, "Dress your gingerbread". It has a standard gingerbread recipe at the beginning, then loads of designs to decorate your gingerbread as different characters and animals, as you can see on the front cover.

I wanted to make some edible gifts at Christmas and decided gingerbread men were fairly festive, quick to make and would keep better than other things I could have baked. I also wanted to make the cow as my boyfriend's last name is pronounced 'cow' (though it's spelled differently). And while he's probably had a lifetime of cow-related jokes and novelty gifts, it's a new one for me, and I'm quite enjoying it!

I used a recipe for the gingerbread from the BBC Good Food website but had to adapt it slightly as I only realised half way through the recipe that I had run out of golden syrup - so I used a mixture of runny honey and black treacle instead!

So I made some gingerbread people and got stuck in decorating. It was more fiddly than I'd expected (aren't these things always?!) and as I wanted to use up odds and ends of icing, some of it wasn't as soft as it could have been, which made rolling out the sugarpaste a little tricky at times.

 

First of all I made some penguins: I spread a little buttercream on the gingerbread, and covered it with black roll-out icing. I used the same gingerbread cutter I'd used for the biscuit to cut out the icing so it would be the same size and shape. I made the white circle on the front and the beak from roll-out icing as well.

Next I decided to have a go at santa. Again I spread buttercream over the biscuit, so the roll-out icing would stick. I piped chocolate buttercream to make a belt, buttons and to mark the end of his trousers, and I used white icing for his sleeves and beard, and also made a little hat. He looks a little bit evil but I was baking about three things at once on Christmas Eve with my parents due to arrive any minute, so things were a little bit rushed!

And here we have a herd of cows. These were my favourite and quite easy to make. Again cover the gingerbread with a little buttercream and then place a piece of white sugarpaste on top to cover the whole biscuit. The black spots are just roll out icing placed quite haphazardly (at this point the black sugarpaste I was using was quite dry, as the packet had been open a while. Random question: what's the best way to store sugarpaste once it's been opened?). I happened to have a small amount of brown sugarpaste left as well, so used that to make the cow's face, and piped eyes and a mouth on in black. I also rolled a small piece of brown sugarpaste and bent it slightly to look like a pair of horns.

I packaged up a few of these and some other gingerbread that I had iced plain and put them in little bags as Christmas gifts - and I had quite a few spare gingerbread people that I didn't ice that I enjoyed myself :-)

Moo!

Cupcake Penguins

Last year I decided to treat myself to a new book - Hello, Cupcake! I came across it on the internet and was intrigued by the book's unusual designs for cupcakes. But they are not as easy to make as you might think!

I would say two main things about this book: firstly, it isn't a baking or recipe book - it is best described as a set of instructions for assembling novelty cupcakes. Secondly, a lot of the products are recommended by name, but they are all American brands. Sometimes I wasn't even sure what they were, and in most cases I found them impossible to buy in this country. However there are often substitutes you can use.

I decided to make penguin cupcakes, as they looked less fiddly than some designs, and I also thought they were really cute! But I'll save the finished cakes til the end of this post..

To begin with, you need to bake (or buy) a batch of cupcakes. I thought plain vanilla would be best but chocolate would probably have worked quite well here too.

The next photo, below, shows several stages at once. For this recipe, I needed a pack of mini ring doughnuts, and a pack of doughnut holes - basically mini doughnuts which in this case had a chocolate filling. The only place I could find that stocked these was Asda, and there wasn't a supermarket I could get to very easily as I don't drive. So my boyfriend - who at the time I had only just met - offered to pick me up from the train station on my way home after work and take me to pick up the stuff I needed. So that's how we came to spend our fourth date at Asda! That was more than a year ago now:-)

I have intentionally left out some of the parts of the process here to not give too much away.

The next step is colouring some more icing to make it black. I decided to use Betty Crocker's chocolate fudge frosting, thinking it wouldn't be too hard to turn brown icing black. Think again! I must have used about half a bottle of black food colouring.Coat the penguins - I'll leave you to work out how best to do it!

!

Then I added a white bib and some wings... can you guess what they are made of?

I used piping icing in white and then black to make the eyes, and half a Fruitella for the beak (which is not what the book recommends but my alternative suggestion). Unfortunately the beak was a little heavy and kept slipping down -and I didn't have a particularly steady hand when I was piping the eyes!

And that's it! Repeat on each cupcake.... obviously I was making more than one when I did each step :-) The black icing was pretty runny and they all look a little messy but I think that just adds to the charm. Be warned though, while the black icing will set a little, it's still quite sticky and these are really messy to eat!

A whole ice rink of penguins!