Gingerbread dinosaurs

My dad and I usually bake together when I visit him. He has a great set of dinosaur cookie cutters, so one of our specialties that we're sure to make whenever I'm around is gingerbread dinosaurs. They're great! And shape makes all the difference. You'll never go back to bears or men once you've had dinosaurs! Last year I gave my dad a new cookie cutter for Christmas. A trout shaped cookie cutter. I figured it would be ok to make gingerbread trouts since fish are an even more ancient lineage than dinosaurs. This gave my dad one of his great ideas. One of his colleagues and fellow member of the "Math Department Fishing Team" had photoshopped a picture of himself and a trout to make the fish look much bigger. My dad has been talking about this ever since. (His usual quip is that they should be modest and instead of making the fish bigger, make themselves smaller...) Anyway. He insisted on taking a picture of me holding up a gingerbread trout, and photoshopped the trout to be nearly as tall as I am! Boy, do I ever wish that was real =).

But back to the dinosaurs... I recently decided that I should get a set of dinosaur cookie cutters of my own so that I can bake cookies while I'm in California. I couldn't find the same set that my dad has, but I found a pretty good one on Amazon. I was so excited when they arrived a couple weeks ago! So I told my dad, expecting that he would be excited too, that it would remind him of the fun we have baking gingerbread dinosaurs. Instead he became sad. Silly dad thought I was replacing him. He thought that now that I have my own dinosaur cookie cutters, I'd never again have reason to return to Georgia. Sheesh... How could anyone ever replace their father with cookie cutters (albeit ones as cool as these)?! They're just supplemental. And anyway, between the two of us, we have a perfect set. You see, his brontosaurus and tricerotops cookie cutters are very good, while the tyrannosaurus and pteranodon cutters stink, and with my set it's the reverse. My tyrannosaurus and pteranodons are awesome, and my brontosaurus and tricerotops are nowhere near as cool as his. They're about equal for the stegosaurus.

So I tried out my cookie cutters and made my very own gingerbread dinosaurs yesterday. They worked beautifully! But I have to say I'm a little annoyed with the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook. See, my edition is probably about 10 years younger than my dad's (if not more). There's been quite a movement to lower fat and sodium in the meantime. So my recipes have all been altered from his to make them "healthier". In the case of the gingerbread cookies, the recipe seems to merely have been shrunk. Mine made exactly 50 cookies, while my dad's makes somewhere around 60 or 70. Alterations to the piecrust recipe are more extreme. They've left all other ingredients unaltered, while reducing the amount of shortening by a third. Fortunately I checked it against my mom's cookbook (which is even older than my dad's) and penciled in the correct quantities. I'd be afraid to try making a piecrust with the same amount of flour but less crisco. I don't think it would work at all!

Sock of the day!! Light pink crew socks with darker pink toes & heels and a pink poodle on the ankle. Since it's freezing in my house I'm also wearing my sheepie slippers from New Zealand. They're made out of sheepskin, and have a stuffed sheepie head on the toe. Unfortunately, one of the sheepies is missing it's face. Crazy Felix liked to pull it off... After being reattached with glue many times, it eventually became lost forever.