Slaving Over Little Gingerbread School Girls

Well, I stayed up till 3 last night making, decorating and wrapping little gingerbread cookies for my classmates and teachers. -_- I'm actually not THAT tired anymore... and since my host mother INSISTED that I wake up at 7am (even though school/worship doesn't start until 9:45) I got to school about 1.5 hours early. Well I slept a plenty on the train and bus ride here, so that might be why I'm not that tired. But yah.. since I had time (and luckly, the university computers were free) I'm here, trying to blow an hour blogging and checking stuff.

Well, unfortunately the cookies didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. They're about half the size I wanted them to be, since I couldn't find a large cookie cutter, I had to work with the small one that my host mom offered me. I made two batches of dough, one yesterday and one the day before but the one I made yesterday was tough and hurt my hands when I pressed the cookie cutter into it. To make things worse, I had to bake the cookies in batches of 9, since the toaster oven was the only method I could use. I suppose its a good thing that the cookies were small now, since if I had made them the size I wanted to, I would have most likely only been able to fit 2 in the oven at once o.O that would have taken forever, seeing that I had over 40 cookies to bake, each taking around 5 minutes to bake.

Well, so I finished all the baking, got all cleaned up and then came the hard part. Well, it wasn't really hard... actually making the icing was easier than I remembered it being. So yes.. I made the icing (while on the phone with mom) and then started mashing blueberries for the blue colour. THAT part didn't turn out so well. At first, there was a light tint of lint grey-blue... but then when I started putting more mashed blueberries to try to darken it, it turned into a lint purple colour and turned watery. -_- So I had to scrap the idea of my little creations wearing blue uniforms and wasted $3 on blueberries which will now reside in the fridge until they go bad or I swallow them whole just to get rid of them and not waste them. (Did I mention I'm not very fond of blueberries?) I had better luck with the red icing (I LOVE the colour powder that I bought... too bad its so expensive, and I bought green and yellow too, even though I didn't get around to using it) And so using a toothpick, I drew scarfs and cuffs on over 50 little cookies. o.O Then I went at it with white icing for the eyes and a blob just above the scarf to represent the symbol we have on the uniform around that area. Not the best I've ever done, but atleast they taste okay...ish. Well, the one I ate did, and the ones that Yoshie and Otou-san ate didn't kill them, so its fine.. right? ^.^;;

After all that was done, I cleaned up, grabbed the boxes of cookies (I had two large boxes of them... single layered of course) and took them upstairs to wrap after I took a bath. And so from 2ish to 3:30am I sat in bed individually wrapping them. o.O I had originally planned to use stickers on the back to close them, but since the cookies came out smaller than I had planned, it was impractical to use the stickers. So now I have 500 cute little chirstmas stickers, and I'm hoping I can refund them (I didn't open the package or anything) because those stickers cost me 1050yen and I could do with that money for other things (like funding my future baking) Ah well, we'll have to see later.

Wow.. what a long pointless rant. Well, I have to get running.. the christmas service is going to start in... one minutes. Great. Well, incase I can't get online before then:

MERRY CHIRSTMAS EVERYONE! HAVE A NICE HOLIDAY!