Gingerbread recipe

by Nik on February 27, 2008

Gingerbread cookies

Gingerbread men are the traditional shape for this biscuit, but if you don’t have a person-shaped cutter to hand you can make them any shape you like. We chose cats, but if you cut them into strips they are ideal for dunking, and ginger dunks particularly well into tea.

These biscuits differ considerably to ginger cookies, in that they don’t contain any salt, and they use plain flour rather than self raising flour. As such, they stay a lot flatter and they don’t have a cracked and broken top characteristic of ginger cookies. This makes them particularly well-suited to decorating with icing, allowing you to add clothing and faces to your gingerbread men, or whiskers and stripes to your cats. They are also often decorated at Christmas time and hung on trees.

The following recipe, which needn’t be followed religiously, and the quantities for which can be varied slightly depending on what you have in your store cupboard is sufficient for around 30 average-sized biscuits, although it depends largely on the size of your cutter. You’ll get more cats, but fewer men.

The ingredient you may like to vary the most is the ground ginger. Four teaspoons, as specified below, makes for a fairly hot biscuit. Two teaspoons is considerably milder.

Ingredients
320g (11oz) plain flour
100g (3.5oz) of butter
100g (3.5oz) of dark muscovado sugar
4 tablespoons of golden syrup
4 teaspoons of ground ginger
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda

Equipment needed
Saucepan
Rolling pin
Cookie cutter (or knife)
Mixing bowl
Hob or stove
Oven
Baking tray

Method
Combine your dry ingredients – the flour, ginger and bicarbonate of soda – in a large mixing bowl and put to one side. Place the butter, sugar and syrup in a pan and melt over a gentle heat. Keep stirring until all of the sugar has melted in the syrup and butter, and you have a smooth dark liquid in the bottom of the pan. Avoid letting it either boil, or burn onto the bottom of the pan. Don’t let it get too hot and bubble, as it could spit.

Being very careful – it will be hot – pour this into the dry ingredients and use a wooden spoon to mix them together until they form a solid mass. You should now have a dark brown ball of pastry ready for cutting, with no evidence of any of the dry ingredients in it. If you can see white flecks of flour, then it needs more thorough mixing.

Sprinkle your worktop with a little flour and place the ball on it for rolling. Roll this until it is around 5mm (0.2in) thick, cut out your shapes and transfer them to greased baking trays. Place these in an oven pre-heated to 170 degrees Celsius (340 degrees Fahrenheit) and bake for 10 minutes.

While this first batch is baking, gather up the off-cuts of your mixture, form them back into a ball and then roll them out for a second (and, if necessary, third) time to cut more shapes. You’ll find that the quality of the mixture degrades with each re-rolling, so if possible cut as many shapes from each rolling as you can to reduce the number of times you have to handle it.

Once baked, remove them from the trays and allow to cool, preferably on wire racks.