We continued making Christmas. Today: gingerbread cookies. We have our own recipe for gingerbread cookie dough, which Eric has tweaked and optimized over the years, so the cookies we make are by now excellently suited to our taste. They are much spicier than store-bought ones.

For a kid, just making cookies is fun enough. Now that has become rather routine, so I come up with extra tweaks to make it more interesting. For example, I like to challenge myself to waste as little dough as possible. Not that it is really wasted, because we roll it out again and again, but do that enough times and the dough becomes too dry and floury.

(Of course an easy way to get the least scraps would be to tile the entire dough with either triangles or crescent moons, but that would be no fun at all, not to bake and not to eat.)

I work inwards from the edges of the rolled dough, choosing the shape that fits best and leaves the least scraps, and then filling in any gaps with smaller shapes.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when the curve of the Christmas tree turned out to be a perfect fit for the curve of the pig’s belly.