"gingerbread man" news and stories

Gingerbread men, gingerbread men in dresses, and is that a gingerbread man in transparent frosting shorts? Call them whatever you like, and dress them however you please, gingerbread men (and the gingerbread women who love them) are Christmas essentials. You can even style them as a portrait in dough of your own family (and isn't it time Aunt Mabel had a likeness in gingerbread?).

Oh, and they make your house smell like Mrs. Claus's kitchen.

Try this Gingerbread Men recipe from our Queen of Cookies, Gina Marie Miraglia Eriquez.

With all the coverage we here at Slashfood have been giving gingerbread men and gingerbread houses I thought it might be fun to search the web for Guinness World Records involving the favorite holiday flavor.

Without doubt, the most impressive gingerbread record this year is Roger Pelcher's gingerbread house. The house - which was built at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn. - stands just shy of 64 feet. Pelcher beat his previous record of 57 feet.

It took him and his team nine days to build the 1,496-square-foot ginger-scented, candy-laden mansion. Given its size and the fact that it includes a gingerbread factory complete with animated elves, I think it's fair to call it a mansion. The gargantuan confection contains 14,250 pounds of gingerbread, 4,750 pounds of icing and more than a ton of candy decorations. Hansel and Gretel eat your heart out.

I'm not sure why people like to make gingerbread creations of outlandish proportions in Minnessota, but they do. From Rochester comes the world's largest gingerbread man. The big guy weighs in at 466 pounds and was baked by the Gingerbread House Bakery. The bakery plans to bring it to the Mall of America to join Pelcher's gingerbread palace.

I'm usually on the lookout for new gingerbread cookie cutters around the holidays and have yet to find a set that I like, largely because the gingerbread people turn out too large. I have one cookie cutter that is probably 10 inches long and is accompanied by a matching snowman cutter. Who wants a gingerbread cookie that big - not to mention the fact that it is a pain to bake enormous cookies because of the increased risk of over/underbaking. This year I came across this set of Gingerbread Family Cookie Cutters, which includes six reasonably-sized cutters (gingerbread man, woman , boy, girl, dog and house), all packed in a small house-shaped tin. In addition to not being inconveniently oversized, the cutters provide more options than a singleton gingerbread man cookie cutter would. It's $13 for the whole set.

Besides - baking your own will be far more fun and a lot less expensive than buying the pre-made cookies individually. If you're really not into baking, however, it might be a good idea to opt for some gingerbread cookie ornaments, which will last much longer.

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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.

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