Gingerbread cookies and xmas lunch

For xmas, we decided to make gingerbread people and animals, I used the colourful choc chips, white icing and a black icing pen to decorate them in all sorts of way. I used this recipe from post punk kitchen but I halved the amount of ginger and I still think they may have been a tiny bit too gingery and added only a pinch of cloves and I used golden syrup instead of molasses:

Gingerbread cutout cookies
1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup plain soymilk (I used rice milk)

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour or all-purpose flour (I just used white)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

spice blend:
1/2 teaspoon each ground nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger

Directions
In a large bowl beat together oil and sugar for about 3 minutes. Add molasses and soymilk. The molasses and soymilk won't really blend with the oil but that's ok.

In a separate bowl, sift together all the other ingredients.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet in batches. Mix together with a firm spoon or spatula until well combined. You should have a pretty stiff dough. Flatten the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap and chill for an hour or up to 3 days in advance. (If you chill longer than an hour you may want to let it sit for 10 minutes to loosen up a bit before proceeding).


Preheat oven to 350 F. Lightly grease your cookie sheets.

On a floured surface roll you dough out to a little less than 1/4 inch thick. You can do this in 2 batches if you don't have the space. Cut out your shapes with your cookie cutters and gently place on cookie sheets (if you are using them to decorate with remember to cut a hole with a straw or something before baking). Bake for 8 minutes.

Remove from oven and let them cool for 2 minutes on the baking sheet then move to a cooling rack. Wait until they are completely cool before icing.

The icing was following was made using the suggestion from PPK of mixing icing sugar with a tiny bit of wter until you get the right consistency, it was so simple.

It was lots of fun cutting out the gingerbread shapes, and it made me realise that I want to make more cut out type cookies, however I found that the dough cracked quite a lot when I baked them as you can probably tell from the santa looking one here:

we also made vegan caramelised onion quiche from vegan brunch and my mother provided the rest of our yummy lunch, which consisted of roasted vegetables, corn and peas cooked with Nuttelex and cheezy broccoli/cauliflower with our family's Vegemite gravy, it doesn't actually taste like Vegemite just adds a depth of flavour.