Saturday, December 5, 2009

Christmas is coming.....

So this weekend we switched on the Christmas lights at work, and they set up the Winter Wonderland in town and I came home Saturday evening to find my fantastic bauble loving Mother adorning every inch of the house with something festive, and I thought the only thing that could add to this would be the aroma of all things spice wafting through the house I decided make gingerbread cookies, and it was delish if I may say so myself! Here’s the tried and tested recipe and a couple o pics of my creations ….. Happy Baking!

Gingerbread Biscuits.

450g Plain flour (extra for dusting), 2 tsp ground ginger, 1 tsp ground mixed spice, 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda, 115g butter room temp (extra for tray greasing), 100g golden syrup, 115g light muscovado sugar, 1 egg beaten
Preheat the oven to 160C gas 3, and grease 3 large baking trays and away you go !

Sift the first 4 ingredients*all the dry ones!* into a large bowl. Place the butter, sugar and syrup in a saucepan over a low heat, stir constantly until melted together. Leave to cool a bit and pour into the dry ingredients and add the beaten egg too. (If the liquid is piping hot and you add the egg, it’ll scramble and believe me spicy floury scramble egg ain’t the result you’re going for!!) Mix all this together to form a dough which will be kinda sticky but it’ll firm up as it cools down.
On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough to 3mm thick and using your fav cookie cutters stamp out your biccies! I made one tree cuz i didnt have a cutter and i free hand cut it, which got old after the first one haha! I also made snowmen, angels and holly. Place the shapes on the prepped trays and re-knead any dough and cut until its all used up. If using edible baubles or currants etc for decoration press them into the cookies now, before baking. Pop them in the oven then, for 15 to 20 mins until firm and lightly browned.

Remove and leave to cool on the trays for a few mins, and transfer to a wire rack. Make sure they’re cold when decorating!

For the icing, I made up 4 little bowls white, black, green and red. You’ll need a piping bag, coupler and a small nozzle attachment. 100g icing sugar to 4tsp water usually gets the consistency you need, add more sugar if its too runny thou or a little more water if too thick (be light handed with the water!)

Pipe away using your own creativity, i piped around the edges just to outline, and using the different coloured icings i did the snowman detail.

Happy Baking xxx







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