All right, it's 8EST, so welcome officially to the December meeting of Eden Cooks! We're obviously featuring gingerbread, which can be made many different ways, from a moist cake to something that's more a building material than a food. The recipe I will be sharing is sturdy enough to be structural, but it still smells and tastes wonderful, so it's a pretty good split down the middle. Ytou can build a house that will stand up two weeks... but you can still eat the scraps

Since gingerbread dough needs to chill for a while, I made some Lemon Zest Sandwich Cookies and a sidecar at the same time. So you get three recipes in one this month, and all using the same delicious citrus.

Be sure to stick around til the end, because there will be five $10 EF gift cards given out to participants!

Before refrigeration, citrus fruits were only available to the northern part of the United States during December. So lots of holiday recipes feature citrus really strongly---they were the delicacy of the month!
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Structural but Still Darn Tasty GingerbreadThis recipe makes a 10x13 rectangle of dough for you to cut house-shapes out of. If you think you might want a bigger house, build a template from pieces of cardboard cut from a cereal box, then lay them all out flat, and see how much cookie you will need. 2.75 cups all purpose flour0.5 tsp salt1 Tbsp baking powder1 tsp ginger, ground1 tsp cinnamon, grounda pinch cloves, ground0.33 cup brown sugar0.66 cup molasses (I used blackstrap, but a milder kind will probably taste better)zest of one lemon0.5 cup oil1 large eggThough perhaps only four ancestral species for citrus existed, hybrids created among many of the species are often edible and true-breeding themselves. If you've ever seen an Uglifruit in a grocery store, know that it is a cross between an orange, a tangerine and a grapefruit (which is itself a naturally-discovered hybrid) which was found growing naturally before the way to recreate it was discovered. less