Christmas Baking - Part 2

Last Sunday I started my Christmas Baking as our Thursday night craft group decided they wanted to decorate gingerbread people as something to do for a bit of fun.

To get started, we firstly made up more royal icing than 5 people could ever hope to get through, using the recipe below:

Royal Icing

Ingredients:
2 egg whites
2 tspns of lemon juice
3 cups of icing sugar

Method:
Beat the egg whites and lemon until soft peaks form. Stir in icing sugar until combined well.

Easy peasy! You must remember, however to keep the icing covered or else it will spoil. We just laid a piece of gladwrap over the top of the icing (so the icing and the gladwrap were touching) to stop it from drying out.

I must say, that decorating the gingerbread was a LOT of fun and somehow between all of the coffee drunk and the giggles had, we actually managed to accomplish a fair amount.

Here is a picture of the gingerbread people Amber and Claire decorated:

And the ones decorated by Jess (check out the one clearly on drugs in the bottom row!):


And Kelly's lovely little creations (she was the winner of the 'best try' badge, although we thought she did a lovely job!):


And finally, the ones I did. Although they don't have any eyes yet because I didn't want their eyes to be out of proportion to their body and I was too lazy to mix up some brown icing. That's a job for tomorrow!:


By the time we finished, we had managed to cover the entire trestle table. Here is a picture of them all together, drying:


I have a feeling that this may become a yearly craft activity as everyone really got into the spirit of things and enjoyed themselves.

I am off to put together the gingerbread houses now, but something tells me it isn't going to be nearly as fun doing it by myself!