Gingerbread Men & Candied Nuts - 12/18/2007

My roommate bought me a gingerbread dough kit for Christmas, so I thought I would give it a shot. It was rather straight-forward and simple. The cookies came out nice, soft and tasty. I did not decorate them, mostly because their heads kept popping off. It looked like they were having their own French Revolution in their plastic bag, though I could not tell which one was Robespierre.


The majority of my holiday work has been spent working on tweaking my step-mom's recipe for candied pecans. Here are the final results:


On the left are green tea flavored pecans using some grean tea powder I bought at the local Asian market. Top right are nutmeg-clove-cinnamon pecans. The usual recipe uses only cinnamon so I thought I would "spice it up" a bit. Bottom right are almonds made with rosemary, garlic powder, and Worcestershire sauce, among other ingredients.


Going clockwise from top left: cardamom-ginger-cinnamon pecans, cinnamon-clove-nutmeg cashews (my favorite), cocoa pecans, and orange pecans (second favorite). Many of these varieties came out very good and I would recommend them to all. Tip of the season: watch what measuring spoon you are using. I used a 1.5 tsp (who makes a 1.5 teaspoon?) instead of a 1/2 tsp and tripled the amount of salt in the orange pecans. Needless to say, I remade the batch normally and had to throw out the first batch.