copy-craft: 5 - "ginger" cookies

You'll perhaps have noted that since it's my first year with a house, and my first year with a dog, that it's pretty much all about them - and so this year I turned our traditional family Christmas cookies into "Ginger" cookies (see, it's a joke - they're sugar cookies, not gingerbread, but they're in the shape of Ginger... funny only to me?).

I may be biased, since I grew up making/eating these cookies for Christmas (and any other holiday my sister and I could get my dad to roll out some dough for us), and the recipe comes from my mom, from her mom. It just isn't Christmas without these cookies.

Here's the recipe:

3c flour
1/2t baking soda
1/2t baking powder
1c butter
2 eggs
1c sugar
1t lemon juice

Sift flour, powder & soda; on low speed of mixer cut in butter until mixture resembles cornmeal. In separate bowl beat eggs, add sugar & lemon extract and beat thoroughly. Blend egg mixture into flour/butter mixture until it forms a ball of dough. Chill dough, then roll, cut, and bake at 375 for 6-8 minutes.

For frosting, we always just used powdered sugar and milk - add milk in very small amounts to powdered sugar until you get a good consistency for spreading. Of course, add food coloring as desired.

When I make these with my family, we always decorate them with sprinkles, but I needed to make my little Gingers look holiday-related:

A couple tips on cookie making and decorating:

Sur La Table has an excellent cookie cutter selection (that's where I got the lab one), and they're inexpensive, so you don't have to feel bad stocking up for Christmas and other occasions.
To keep the frosting really tidy, it helps to pipe the border on first, then when it's set a little bit, use a knife to fill in the rest.
To get a real red frosting color, you need gel food coloring, available at Michael's/Hobby Lobby. Start out by making the frosting pink, and then you won't need to add as much of the red color (if you don't, you could end up using the whole jar of red to get the intended color!)