So, when there’s 2 feet of snow outside and the weather is a brisk 31 below (no joke!), what else do you do?

Bake homemade gingerbread cookies, of course!

The whole house smells like gingerbread, I wish I could send that through the computer. Doug made the gingerbread dough yesterday. He and Emily rolled out the dough and made the shapes.

We have wreaths, bells, trees, stars, candles and stockings. We have some really cool metal cookie cutters that I got from a website years ago called, “Off the Beaten Path”

They have over 800 cookie cutters and the good metal ones, too. Plastic just doesn’t give you the same sharpness as the metal ones do.

I just love the spicy / sweet combination of gingerbread, so I made a royal frosting, too, so that we could add some really fun decorations. Emily did great with the decorations and it was a lot of fun!

Since the icing is really sweet, I love this on gingerbread rather than sugar cookies. I love cookies, but for me, royal icing on sugar cookies is almost too sweet.

If I could, I’d send some your way!

By the way, that’s our good friend, Dale, sitting on the couch watching t.v. He’s up from Chicago for the weekend. While he didn’t help make the cookies, he sure did help in the taste-testing.