Can’t Catch Me

Gina went out of town earlier this week for a four-day business trip. Right after she left Abby had one of her great ideas: “Let’s make gingerbread men as a surprise for Mom when she comes home.” I have no idea where she came up with this. We’ve never made gingerbread men at our house and we’ve never bought any that I can remember. But because I’m a great dad I told her it was a great idea. She said, “OK let’s go.” I told her we’d better wait until the day before Mom came home so the cookies would be fresh. Everyday thereafter when I’d pick her up from school she’d ask if we were going to make gingerbread men. She’d then sulk for an hour or so when I said “three more days, two more days,” etc. I found a recipe on the Internets and went and bought all the ingredients and when the day came Abby and I went to a local kitchen store and bought big, medium and small gingerbread man cookie cutters.

I hauled out my trusty twin SB-600s and two shoot-through umbrellas to capture what promised to be a magical father-daughter evening. Also I figured the gingerbread men would make good subjects to shoot with the beater macro lens I recently bought on eBay.

We mixed the butter and brown sugar together and whipped it up in the mixer. Abby kept asking when she was going to get to lick the beaters. Fortunately for her, but unfortunately for me, I forgot to put the molasses in the mix. I realized my mistake and had to dump the half-made dough and start all over.

Abby got to pour the molasses in. I’ve never worked with molasses before and we both agreed that it’s stinky and doesn’t taste very good. I began to worry that the final product would be inedible.

We finally got the dough made and Abby was jumping around the whole time asking to use the rolling pin. I had to give her the tortuous news that we’d have to chill the dough in the fridge for an hour to make it right for the rolling pin process. We ordered a pizza and ate it while we waited. We had been at for over an hour at this point. Our magical evening was starting to become a long slog.

Abby finally got her turn with the rolling pin.

Then we wielded the cookie cutters. This took a long time. We made enough gingerbread men (and women, I suppose) to field a gingerbread person army. I wanted to tell Abby the Gingerbread Man story, but I couldn’t remember how it went. I knew the Gingerbread Man ran away from people and yelled something over and over, but I couldn’t recall what it was. And I had the vague idea that he met a bad end like he fell in a creek and dissolved or something like that.

OK, I just looked up the story and it’s more gruesome than I thought. The Gingerbread Man doesn’t fall in the creek. A fox eats him.

The cookies came out of the oven in decent shape and the stinky molasses smell was gone. Once again we had a bit of a wait as the cookies cooled enough to put the icing on. They actually smelled and tasted like actual gingerbread men. I was shocked they turned out right.

The icing part was fun for about the first four cookies. Then I looked at the vast array of naked gingerbread men laid out on the table before us and feared we’d never get done.

The one in the foreground here was my masterpiece.

This one is Abby’s masterpiece. It’s a girl. You can tell by the pink hair.

We finally got done about 9:30 p.m. Abby had to skip her bath and go to bed. I asked her how she liked it: “It was a little boring sometimes.”

After Abby went to sleep I came back and made a bunch of macro shots to test out the new lens.

Abby got what she wanted. Gina was quite surprised when she got in at 12:30 a.m.