Gingerbread Disaster

Can you believe that Christmas is so soon? I feel like it snuck up on us this year. I still have about a billion projects to finish - mostly sewing/crocheting related. Yikes!

Last night a few of my friends and I got together for a holiday movie/cookie making session. We watched "A Muppet's Christmas" and made and decorated several types of cookies. Val made some scrumptious almond sugar cookies. Carolyn brought gingerbread bees and Randi brought regular sugar cookie dough.

Found this image on this blog and couldn't resist!

For our contribution, I also made gingerbread dough. I love gingerbread so wanted to make sure I had my fill. I made some really tasty gingerbread cookies with a lemon glaze last year, but couldn't find the recipe (read - I was too lazy to get it off of our external hard drive). I found this recipe on epicurious and decided it would be good enough!

Well, after tasting a little of the dough, I knew something was off. It was not nearly sweet enough. When the first batch came out of the oven, it was confirmed. Gross. One batch of dough in the trash. I double, triple checked that I followed the ingredients and I HAD!

A mystery...

When I came home I had an idea where I had went wrong and quick checked the molasses bottle. Ugh...in small letters on the back of the bottle under ingredients it read: Blackstrap molasses. Not regular molasses. Too dense, not sweet enough. And it didn't say it on the front of the bottle! There was no indication that they weren't normal baking molasses. No wonder the dough was gross.

Here's the kicker - I already had blackstrap molasses in the house for bread baking, but knew I needed regular molasses for the cookies. We went to the store specifically to pick some up. Whoops.

Oh well, at least the mystery is solved.

Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanzaa, New Years from our kitchen to yours!