The Gingerbread Pirates Book and Activity

During our last library visit I happened across the book, The Gingerbread Pirates.  I had no clue what is was about as I had not heard of it before.  I judged this book completely by it's cover (that's a no, no, right!?) But the cover did not mislead as it was a really fun book and after our first read my daughter said, "again, again!"

The next day my 9 year old also read it to his sister and I heard them both giggling. It's a cute story and interesting enough for both my 4 year old and 9 year old.  The book is about a boy who bakes pirate gingerbread men with his Mother and has a favorite cookie, "Captain Cookie" with a peg leg.  Captain Cookie and his crew head out on an adventure to make sure Santa Claus does not have them for his Christmas Eve snack!

My daughter asked if we could make a "Captain Cookie" and since I love pairing books with activities we got started right away.  Since this was a last minute request I was not prepared to bake gingerbread cookies and it was an icy and rainy day so no running out to the store.  Plan B.....make sugar cookie dough and use our gingerbread man cookie cutter to make gingerbread man shaped cookies. In addition to not having the ingredients for authentic gingerbread cookies I also didn't have any white icing so I used some left over green icing and melted some chocolate to use as decoration for our gingerbread men.  Luckily we had plenty of sprinkles and decorative sugar on hand! Our baking session turned into baking other cookies as well which was just fine and we even have some left over dough on hold in our freezer.

My daughter said we had to have a peg leg pirate too just like in the story so I broke off a piece of the gingerbread pirate's leg and stuck in a toothpick!  She calls him Captain Peg Leg!

Here is the rest of our Gingerbread Men Pirate Crew!

This turned out to be alot of fun baking and creating! We will definitely try this baking session again and will wait till my son is not in school so he can partake too.  A great activity for preschoolers and school age kids!

Here is the dough recipe we used to make our pirate cookie crew:

1 Cup butter, softened
1 Cup sugar
1 egg
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp vanilla
2 3/4 Cup flour
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  In large bowl cream butter and sugar with mixer.  Beat in egg and vanilla.  Add baking powder and flour, 1 cup at a time.  Mix well.  Bake 6-7 minutes or until cookies are lightly browned.  Makes approx: 3 dozen cookies.