So last night, I headed around, picked up a few things and then started making dinner. Meatloaf, some chive mashed potatoes and a bit of bread from La Mie.

What's the occasion? Bribery. In turn for helping us decorate gingerbread cookies, I made Chris and Holly dinner.

Ok, so maybe they didn't need to much bribing, but it also goes into my whole idea of doing little mini dinner parties. Anyways...the food turned out very well, and then we went into cooking the gingerbread cookies.

I used a recipe from Cook's Illustrated. Or at least one i found on the internet that was from Cook's Illustrated. It turned out great and easy too...since it was made in the food processor (it also said you could use a mixer, but I didn't read that part until afterwards. The cookies turned out very good. So much so that we decided to make a another batch. And Chris did all the work.

Shannon had to run to the store and get some more molasses, and she got a full bodied molasses (we had gotten mild before) so the second batch was a bit darker. It also had a bit of a richer taste.

Then we made some frosting, and Holly helped. I think the recipe was a bit wrong or maybe we just messed it up a little, but it was a little runny...not to much, but it wasn't solidifying very quickly on the cookies.

So Chris, Holly and Shannon dressed up a few cookies with frosting, candies and what not. Chris spent quite a bit of time on a couple of cookies, being very meticulous. They looked very good. And combined with the extra-vanillaey frosting, oh it was fantastic.

The intention was to get a bunch of cookies decorated and take them to my office, for snack day today, but when 11 or so rolled around, it was pretty much out of the question. So I filled up a tupperware with unfrosted cookies.

Chris and Holly took a few of theirs home and we stayed up a bit longer to clean up a bit more.

It was a good time...but It was a long day. Working then basically cooking from 5 to 11. I was very tired afterwards.

But it was very fun though!