Great-grandma's gingerbread cookies

---------- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
  
       Title: 1989 2nd Place: Great-Grandma's Gingerbread Cookies
  Categories: Cookies, Holiday
       Yield: 36 servings
  
     1/2 c  Vegetable shortening
       1 c  Sugar
       3    Eggs
     1/2 c  Cold water
       2 ts Baking soda
       1 c  Sorghum or molasses
            All-purpose flour (5-6 cups)
       1 ts Ground cinnamon
     1/2 ts Ground cloves
       1 ts Ginger
     1/2 ts Salt
  
     Preparation time: 30 minutes Chilling time: Overnight Baking time: 10
     minutes
   
      1. Cream shortening and sugar in mixing bowl, beat in eggs, one at a
     time. Mix water and baking soda in small bowl until dissolved. Add
     baking soda mixture and sorghum to butter mixture. Sift 5 1/2 cups of
     the flour, the spices and salt together. Blend into dough. Divide
     dough into 4 balls. Wrap in plastic wrap. Flatten and refrigerate
     overnight.
   
      2. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Roll 1 portion of dough out at a time on
     lightly floured surface. Cut into desired shapes. Bake on a greased
     cookie sheet until puffed, 10 to 12 minutes. Do not overbake.
   
      3. When cool, decorate with buttercream frosting and/or candies as
     desired. Sorghum gives these cookies a special flavor, but molasses
     can be used as a substitute.
   
     Ann Smith of Plainfield won second place, and described how her
     gingerbread men left Bohemia in 1872 and immigrated to the United
     States. Smith's great-grandmother, "Babicka" Novak, lived in a small
     Czech-American town in South Dakota where Smith's mother grew up in
     the 1920s. At Christmas time, her great-grandma would give her
     neighbors Old World gingerbread men, reindeer and rocking horses.
       "One year when Great-grandma delivered the cookies, she brought
     along her teenaged grandson, who was visiting from a small ethnic
     Czech community in Nebraska," Smith wrote.
       "Introductions made that day over the watchful eyes of the
     gingerbread men eventually lead to wedding bells for my parents a
     decade later. Great-grandma Novak probably had planned this all
     along!" from the Chicago Tribune second annual Food Guide Holiday
     Cookie Contest December 14, 1989
  
 -----