Holly Jolly

What says the holidays like gingerbread and sparkles? I (Liv) love cookies and when you dip them into hot chocolate or tea they just melt. I am however, perhaps unreasonably picky about my cookies. Especially gingerbread. It has to be crunchy, but chewy and soft. It has to be sweet, but hot and spicy. Luckily, I trust the Food Network for things like this, so I decided on this recipe, in the hopes that 111 positive reviews would prove true. They did. My royal icing, used here, turned out perhaps a little too thick, but it worked. It is now finally starting to feel like Christmas. 

While my gingerbread chilled in the freezer (I was impatient and not prepared to refrigerate for longer), I decided to entertain myself. How do I do that? Make homemade marshmallows. The recipe called for unflavored gelatin which I had seen in my pantry for as long as I could remember. When I looked at the package it told it had expired in '09, so I pretended not to notice that and carried on with the recipe. Unfortunately, that poor expired gelatin failed me. It did not harden enough, so it left me with overly sticky marshmallow fluff. The gelatin has now been replaced with a new box, expiring '14. Now, I am not one to let a recipe fail... ever. Even if it totally illogical for me to keep going, I will anyway because I absolutely refuse to fail. So after sticking the marshmallows in the coldest part of my freezer for a few hours I removed them, without any improvement on the solidified front. So I worked a few magical tricks over the course of about 2 hours until I had about thirty beautiful, hardly sticky,  peppermint marshmallows. They too are magical, like myself, because they make perfectly average hot chocolate into peppermint hot chocolate. How is that for holiday magic?