
I don't know that I would have occurred to me to use some of the presentation tricks that Heidi, of 101 Cookbooks, used for her Gingerbread Man Cookies, but I'm glad that I've seen them now. A must-have on any holiday cookie plate, gingerbread men are fun to make, fun to decorate and, as long as you choose a good recipe to start with, fun to eat. Heidi said that she revamped her standard recipe this year to use white whole wheat flour and less refined sugar, instead opting to sweeten her cookies with a coarser natural cane sugar and molasses. The cookies are spicy, but sturdy, so they can hold up to decoration. Again, instead of going with a frosting that would use refined sugar, she simply sprinkled the cookies with very coarse grained natural sugar (turbinado). The giant crystals add a sparkle, a crunch and are a nice change of pace from cookies decorated with royal icing. Her motivation for using the stick was presentation: the cookies can be stood up in a container or small flower pot filled with sugar, which looks a lot more dramatic than laying them out on a serving platter.











