Off day: Gingerdead cookies

Today I made:
Gingerdead cookies, Fred and Friends Blog

Last year Mom gave me one of these cookie cutters. She suggested making the gingerbread-inspired cookies from the company's accompanying blog. I'm making them for our lab's "Great Pumpkin Beer Hour" tomorrow, where people bring pumpkin-flavored beers and baked goods. I was told that as long as the baked goods contained pumpkin pie spices, they were welcome ;) These have plenty of ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, so I think they'll do the trick.

I first really tried to make cookies on my own when I was living in Japan with a microwave oven that had a convection oven setting. It was really difficult, as you might imagine, given that I could only fit like five cookies on the one tray at a time. So I always assumed that cookies were just really difficult to make, until I came back to America and had access to a(n almost) full-sized oven again. Then, I was pleasantly surprised when cookies were just fine to make.

But these cookies were challenging! Or rather, the cookie cutter was. On one side it cuts out the skull shape, and on the other side it has the design to be pushed in to the top of the cookie. My mom had warned me that it really needed a lot of flour. But really, it needed many trips back into the fridge. By the time I had cut out a sheet of cookies, they were so warm they kept sticking to the design when I tried to imprint it. And once one little piece got stuck (in the teeth), it was game over and everything stuck. Once I was done with that, of course the dough was even warmer and then refused to come up off the wax paper. There was a little bit of a range:

And Siamese twins:

The taste is a pretty standard gingerbread. I like the thicker ones better than the ones that were cut from the edge of the rolled out dough. Growing up, we always had gingerbread, not gingerbread cookies. It was cakey and sticky. But Grandma always made gingersnaps. I wonder what the difference between gingersnaps and gingerbread cookies is.