May 5, 2018

May the Fourth Be With You

Ah, May the Fourth one of the best days of the year. Let me just tell you, I am a huge Star Wars fan! (minus Episodes I, II, and III because I just don’t believe in my heart they are canon and I don’t care what anyone else says) I have been since I was really little. I remember with such fondness that we had the VHS set in the gold case with Darth Vaders face and IT WAS THE COOLEST THING IN THE WORLD! It makes me sad my family got rid of it when we made the switch over to DVD. Trying not to be bitter about it. But I miss it like Luke misses his hand.

I think part of the reason I love Star Wars is that Princess Leia was the first time I saw a character that could be me. She was a girl but she got to be part of the adventure with the boys and wasn’t just stuck back at base doing nothing. This meant when all the neighbourhood kids played Star Wars in the park I could actually do things! I could be part of the game! As we have more and more conversations about representation in media I think back to watching Star Wars and how much that empowered me as a little kid. It still makes me feel like I can be brave and strong and smart and a woman. No one can take that feeling away from me, because if Princess Leia can do it so can I. That’s something every kid and every person deserves. To have the stories and characters relate to you and encourage you is so powerful.

Won’t lie the other pretty big reason is that Star Wars is just so cool! The adventure, worlds created, that you get to dream about maybe being a Jedi and having lightsabers and powers! They all make Star Wars magical to me. Any reason to let my Star Wars nerd shine is a good day for me! This May the Fourth I wanted to make some tasty and nerdy treats.

Ok, This little baking adventure (ordeal) has lead me to believe that gingerbread should maybe be left to Grandmothers and people who have made some sort of sacrifice to the baking gods. My goodness. My first mistake in this whole process was that I found a British recipe that was in grams, not cups. That is some advanced level stuff and I totally messed up the conversion. My second big mistake was that being an idiot when the recipe said ground ginger I thought it meant GROUND GINGER ROOT, not the ginger powder.

Look at me taking pictures of a whole massive thing of ginger thinking I could make cookies. What. An. Idiot. But moving on, ignore the ginger root, here is what you will actually need.

INGREDIENTS:

3 cups Flour
2 tsp ground ginger (NOT GINGER ROOT)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
chocolate chips
silver sprinkles

Combine flour, ground ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, nutmeg, and salt in a large mixing bowl.

In a separate bowl mix together the butter and sugar until it’s fluffy. I have no idea what fluffy sugar butter is supposed to look like so just mixed till it looked like this and left it at that.

Then add the egg, molasses, and vanilla to your fluffy sugar butter. Would it be a Hannah baking adventure if I didn’t realize halfway through I was missing an ingredient? Yeah, I planned on the British recipe working out so I didn’t buy molasses. After a quick google consultation crisis was averted because you can substitute corn syrup.

Mix your dough all up and wrap in saran wrap to sit in the fridge for FOUR HOURS… or overnight. Ugh, why gingerbread men, why? I guess the positive is now you have time to watch A New Hope and the Empire Strikes Back. Get a jump on some Star Wars marathoning while your gingerbread dough chills in the fridge.

Took me four hours to realize I’d also used all my parchment paper up so I couldn’t use it to roll out the dough. It’s cool I just reached a point where I was determined to continue on no matter how bad the outcome might be. Probably how Ewan McGregor felt halfway through the Phantom Menace. Instead, I just used plastic wrap to layer the counter and to go over the dough while I rolled it out. Worked out better than the Phantom Menace in my opinion.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t have parchment paper but I did have five different gingerbread cookie cutters. So I chose the one with a weird shoulder. Obviously.

Use a butter knife to poke your gingerbread cookies to turn them into Wookies! Then bake for 12-15 minutes. Or just until they start to get brown on the sides. The cookies will harden up more once they are out of the oven. The lack of molasses probably affected the colour of the cookies but they are cookies so I’m not complaining.

Let these cookies cool stacked in a precise tower on a plate because your cooling rack is too far back in the cupboard and you can’t be bothered. Melt your chocolate in the microwave in 30-second intervals then put in either a piping bag or just a good old-fashioned ziplock bag. Pipe out a bandolier across your Wookie cookies. As you go line the bandolier with silver sprinkles or white chocolate chips. Whatever you happen to have on you.