As I was listening to the “Fun Bonding Activities for Christmastime” workshop I gave last year, I realized that I had promised my readers to put a pathetic picture of a gingerbread cookie nativity scene on my blog. (Well, I didn’t say it was going to be pathetic, but I said I would put it up even if it was pathetic, so you could point and laugh.)
Thankfully I found some nativity cookie cutters at a yard sale over the summer. Then I decided that I don’t like gingerbread, so I made a sugar cookie recipe instead. Bad idea. Part of what I hate about gingerbread is that it’s as hard as a rock, so it’s easy to construct buildings out of it. Well, I baked two huge sugar cookie triangles and put chocolate frosting on both sides. Very messy. Then they broke, right in my hands. (If you click on the picture, you will see it close-up. I tried to glue it back together with more frosting, but it was still precarious.)
I frosted the nativity characters in white, even though you could use brilliant cake dye colors to clothe them in brighter colors. The reason I used plain white was that the entire structure was about to collapse, and time was of the essence. Then I stood the figures up in the goopy icing.
I ran out the door, taking the kids to Awana and having a lovely date night with my husband at a nice Thai place. When we arrived back home, the entire cookie nativity scene had collapsed. Unfortunately I got no picture of the collapsed structure for you to laugh at, because my children all asked if they could have a piece, and they broke the thing apart and started eating it after I said, “I guess so.”
So here is what I’ve learned through this fiasco:
Tip #1: If you are making a gingerbread nativity scene instead of a gingerbread house, make sure you use gingerbread. Also, the gingerbread is brown and already looks like a stable, so you don’t need any icing.
Tip #2: Get a cake pan lid and cover it with aluminum foil. Then slather it with an entire bucket of chocolate frosting, so that you can stand the cookies up in the goop without the figures falling over.
Tip #3: Decorate the nativity figures before assembling the structure, in case the structure is about to collapse when you assemble it.
Tip #4: Have a sense of humor. This will come in handy when you come home from Awana, just to find that the cookie nativity scene has gone through some sort of natural disaster.
