When gingerbread men turn...

Every other Monday, the Tech Group (which is more or less the entire Engineering Department) has a meeting, mostly to catch up on HR stuff (like awards and introducing new hires), and listening to presentations on a variety of tech-related topics currently of interest.

This past Monday, however, we held gingerbread decorating instead of an actual meeting. Only a handful of us showed up. The majority, I think, were out on vacation :-) The rest were simply not inclined for such shenanigans ;-)

Anyway, we trooped downstairs and found a table laden with gingerbread men, cans of icing, toppings, and frosting. And while there was a huge plateful of whole gingerbread men, there were also 2 boxes to the side containing broken pieces.

It was this box that I began rummaging through. At first I thought I might try a Frankenstein-like creation-- gluing together obviously mismatched body parts with icing. But then I discovered a headless, legless gingerbread man (his body in one box, his head in another) and my imagination kicked into overdrive. Especially when I discovered that one of the cans of icing was red in color...

This is what I came up with:



But it needed more of a crime-scene feel to it, I mused. So I grabbed a marker and drew a chalk outline. Then, drawing inspiration from bloody scenes I'd seen in newspapers and television shows, I added a smear in what would've been the right place for a fatal bullet hole. Missing from this photo is the last finishing touch: I cut a yellow post-it note into strips, taped the strips together end-to-end to create a long, thin "caution tape" strip and then wrote "CAUTION DO NOT ENTER" repeatedly across it... just like real yellow police tape! :-) I then used it to cordon off the crime scene :-D It actually worked, for my plate trio sat in the corner of the table, well away from the other, normal creations!

Click on image for larger, gorier details ;-)



Yeah... Helly has a morbid imagination. That doesn't actually surprise any of you, does it? I guess I was making up for my lack of doing anything gory on Halloween ;-) Some people said the cookiecide scene reminded them of Shrek. My husband grew wary of going home with me that night, and insisted on sleeping with one eye open. Never mind that some of those ideas came from him! :-P

So... cookies, anyone? *maniacal grin* >:-D