This is the first year I was making gingerbread cookies on a large scale. I've made several dozen chocolate chip cookies at a time but those are drop cookies and not decorated. These gingerbread cookies will take much longer. This year was to be the first time on a large scale. Now I'll lean from mistakes this year so that if I do it again it won't take as long because I'll know what I'm doing.
We used the Betty Crocker gingerbread cookie mix and used salted and unsalted butter, basically whatever we had in the freezer. After it was all done, we didn't notice a difference in taste between using salted and unsalted butter. The Betty Crocker mix is simple, just add butter and water. I didn't want to search for a homemade recipe because I knew that this was going to be a lot of work and was going to keep this part simple.
We made one batch at first to test out the recipe. It worked fine. I had a nice picture of me rolling out the gingerbread in my nice clothes on that test batch but that wasn't reality so it didn't get posted.
Now that one batch was made, time to make the rest, another eight bags of gingerbread cookie mix. All of the gingerbread dough was made at once and then refrigerated overnight. The next day I got to cooking. Actually rolling. I had to roll out and cook for hours. There were no pictures of this. Cookies were everywhere. Both the kitchen counter and myself were covered in flour. Well not that bad but the counter was covered and I had flour on my arms, pants, and face.
I had three trays of cookies going at a time. One baking, one cooling off, and one being loaded with cookies.
 |
| Decorating was just as hard as rolling out and baking them. |
 |
| White, red, and green holiday icing. |
 |
| It was fun making different faces. They start to look funny after decorating for a long time. The steady hand isn't so steady anymore. Also this is a good shot of the different sizes. We had big ones, regular size ones, small ones, and a gingerbread house for the little gingerbread man. |
 |
| Here is Toby looking desperate to get a cookie. I did learn that making gingerbread cookies and leaving them out to cool and leaving them out for the icing to dry will drive the dogs crazy. They whined and whined for days while our little factory was churning out gingerbread men. |
 |
| Eight full boxes of gingerbread men and one full tin (not pictured). Lots of gingerbread men for the whole family. After it was all finished, over 175 gingerbread cookies were made! |
What did I learn for next year?
- Make more big gingerbread men and less medium-sized ones; big cookies are easier to decorate and have more room for detailed decorations also they aren't as tedious to roll and cut out
- Make the dough all at once and let it cool in the refrigerator
- Watch out for the little scavengers! They will find a way to steal a cookie off the table if you don't watch them.
