The Practical Hitty Newsletter
Editors: Hitty Henrietta and Charlotte Hitty

Good, Plain Cooking from Mrs. Plum's Kitchen

You can run, run, run, as fast as you can, but you can't catch Mrs. Plum's Gingerbred Men!
But you can make them with her Secret Family Recipe.

INGREDIENTS

The clay Christmas tree Gingerbread Men that Mousie came up with are nice, but if you have a sweet tooth, here's my secret family recipe for tasty eatable Gingerbread Men.

Don't preheat the oven yet, because this recipe has to cool in the icebox for a spell before rolling. This is an important step, so don't think you can skip it.

Mix the molasses, brown sugar, water, and shortening. This is going to look weird, because the shortening doesn't really want to mix with the water. Keep at it. Once these ingredients are blended, you can add all the rest of the ingredients, stirring as you go. Once you get to the end of the flour it gets hard to mix, but make sure it is all blended. Shape into several fist-sized balls, cover, and stick in the icebox for two hours.

Now preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Roll out the balls of dough on a heavily floured surface until it's about 1/4" thick. If it's too thin, the cookies will burn or be hard. If it's too thick, they'll be doughy. So be careful. Cut out with your Gingerbread Men cookie cutter. Place these carefully on a lightly greased cookie sheet and bake for 10-12 minutes.

When the cookies are cool, they can be decorated with frosting. The girls here at the school love to make these cookies in Home Ec, and sometimes before baking they press raisins in for the eyes.

All images and text copyright 2002 Julie DeGroat, Sara Cole, or their respective artists
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