Brown guys

When my brother and I were little he referred to gingerbread men as "brown guys." Eric and I made eight or nine dozen last Friday. We ate some and froze some, and I donated the rest to the holiday fundraiser for the local branch of the American Association for University Women. I also volunteered as a ticket taker at said fundraiser, a holiday tour of homes, on Sunday. Honestly, it weirds me out seeing so many grandparents in their 40s and 50s. The AAUW uses the money for a scholarship for a female graduate student, and I've recently been named the the chair of this year's scholarship committee. It would be really nice to see an M.A. student in English get the award this year -- I don't think that's happened in recent memory. Anyway, here are some photos of us making brown guys. Thanks to my mom's colleague Shelley for sharing her recipe. I tried to do fancy frosting with a pastry bag, but either the Betty Crocker bag I bought for $4 sucks or I suck at doing it (or both). I gave up on the bag and smeared royal icing on the guys. Spritz (a.k.a. "gun cookies" in my family, because you shoot them out of a cookie press) are next on the baking agenda, after, of course, I finish a big pile of grading, calculate final grades, and figure out how to turn them in using a horrific DOS-based program.