Gingerbread SmackDown!

I love gingerbread. I know people who don’t, and to that I say: More for me. One of my favorite aspects of winter, though, is that gingerbread flavors are everywhere. Panera has an awesome gingerbread bagel. Starbucks has the gingersnap latte (which is not as good as last year – and I finally figured out today what it was missing: NUTMEG). I even saw an ad for Coldstone Creamery that showed a gingerbread cake with gingerbread ice cream inside and even though it’s far too cold for ice cream, I’m more than a little tempted.

I always make gingerbread cookies at this time of year, but admittedly – I’ve typically made them from a mix. This year, I figured I would do it right. I would actually make them from scratch. I dug through my binders of recipes (seriously: HUGE binders filled with recipes) and found two gingerbread cookie recipes. One was from Cooking Light magazine. The other was a Paula Deen recipe.

I made the CL version on Friday night, the Paula version on Sunday. The CL version had less butter, more molasses and used white sugar instead of brown. The Paula version had twice as many calories and more than twice as much fat (but I still have to say, nutritionally, gingerbread cookies? Not that bad for you. Thank god – because I have eaten A LOT of them in the past few days). The CL version was easier to roll and work with and though both versions tasted good, the CL cookies were actually better.

Once I finish eating all the gingerbread cookies that are sitting on my counter and finish the Paula gingerbread dough in my fridge, I will be using only the Cooking Light recipe for the rest of the season.

Oh the trouble I go through for my cookies.

Everything Tastes Better As Cheesecake

Gingerbread is one of those flavors that I associate with the holidays. I rarely have anything gingerbread-ish any other time of the year, so by the time November rolls around and the Gingerbread lattes come out, well, I am ALL ABOUT THE GINGERBREAD.

Of course, I love cheesecake too.

The past few days I have been brainstorming how I could mix the two and today – I did it.

The recipe is posted on Wha’Cha Got Cooking (because I suck! I suck! I suck! And I haven’t posted a recipe there in a VERY LONG TIME – though, to be fair – really, you all should feel grateful because I’m not that great of a cook. So it’s really only dessert recipes you want from me anyway).

I had a yummy piece of it and then promptly packed the rest of it up for my husband to take to work tomorrow so I won’t eat any more of it!

Sometimes I Am A Whiner.

Yesterday, I stopped at Starbucks (duuuuuuuuh) after a quick trip through Target and asked them about gingerbread – were they going to have it in sugar free this year. The barrista said she didn’t think so, and then handed me these little cards asking, “Do you like computers at all?” (Lady, do I like computers? Um, yeah). “Here’s their website – you can write in to them and tell them what you think.”

But, I don’t ever do anything the easy way – and besides, I needed a picture of the day. (You can click on it to make it bigger but it says: “Dear Starbucks: I am really bummed that you won’t be offering Gingerbread in a sugar free version this year. I was really looking forward to restarting my addiction to gingerbread lattes. Alas, I guess it wasn’t meant to be. Sarah P.S. Those crystallized ginger things in the gingersnap latte? Those are REALLY gross.” For the record, those suckers are supposed to melt, but don’t, and then you end up CHEWING your coffee. Nasty).

My next step was to put my pic in my Flickr photo stream and then I Twittered the folks at MyStarbucksIdea (twitter.com/mystarbucksidea) to send them the link.

SarahinMI: @mystarbucksidea Today my 365 picture is for you 🙂 [then a link to the above pic on Flickr]

I woke up this morning to see a reply from them:

MyStarbucksIdea: @SarahInMI Ha! So clever! Why isn’t everyone so clever?

I then went on to ask if clever was code for obnoxious, to which they assured me that no, if I was obnoxious, they’d say so… and then a bit ago a post to me and another eager twitter-er letting us know they’d be checking in to the lack of sugar free options. Whoo!

So, I guess the moral of the story is, if you need to whine, you should totally do it with arts and crafts.

You’re welcome.