Finally! A Gingerbread Recipe That's Quick To Make And Tastes Great!
Nov 30 '05 (Updated Feb 15 '06)
The Bottom Line They're quick, taste great and are a blast to decorate!
After playing around with a recipe for the better part of three years I finally perfected it. Well, at least to me it’s perfect. There is something so comforting about the smell of gingerbread baking in the oven, the whole house smells divine and there are tons of design options once they’ve cooled off. You can go the simple route and decorate them before you bake them or get elaborate and create ‘look alike’ cookies that you decorate to look like your family and friends. I honestly think that baking cookies like this is a dying art; supermarkets whip these out by the thousands and most people opt to buy them rather than to make their own. If you are someone that has always wanted to make gingerbread boys or girls for the holidays, here is a recipe that is easy to make, yields a nice looking cookie and can be decorated in a plethora of different ways.
Ingredients
1/4 cup butter - softened
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup dark molasses [black strap is a great pick]
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup water
Mix the butter and brown sugar until it blended then pour in the molasses and mix. In a separate bowl sift together the flour, baking soda, ginger, salt, cloves and cinnamon. Take the dry mix and start adding it to the wet mix; when everything is combined start to add the water a little at a time until you have a nice firm dough. You can add more cinnamon or cloves depending on how strong you want them but remember, it is easy to add more but hard to take away excess amounts so don’t go hog wild with the spices. You can do this by hand or with a mixer, just make sure you don’t add too much of the water - if you don’t use it all that’s no problem, just don’t go adding more than a quarter cup or your cookies will be paper thin.
When you have the mix completed you may want to refrigerate it if you are working in a warmer climate or right next to the oven. Roll out the dough on a floured surface until it is between a half and quarter inch; use any type of cookie cutter you wish to cut out the figures. I tried this with the Wilton 5 Point Perimeter Cookie Cutter and they looked so incredible when I frosted them. Once you have the shapes cut out, place them on a cookie sheet that you have lined with parchment paper and bake them in a 350 degree oven for eight to twelve minutes. [Reduce the heat by 25 degrees if you are cooling them on a dark cookie sheet] The baking time depends on the size of the cookie, how many are on a sheet and their shape. Larger ones will take more time, smaller ones less time. If they start to rise on you give the cookie sheet a good whack when you take it out of the oven to ‘drop’ them. This will give you nice level cookies to decorate. Remove them carefully from the cookie sheet and allow them to cool on a wire cooling rack.
If you are going to prepare a royal icing to decorate with I highly suggest using a meringue powder instead of an egg white mixture; this is easier to work with and there are fewer health risks involved with it. You can decorate these with anything you wish but if you want to save time, use raisins for eyes, dried cranberries for buttons, assorted candies for accents - pretty much anything that you can shove into the raw dough. If you are going to decorate them after they have baked you will want to make sure that they are completely cooled. Most people think that you have to use gingerbread shaped cookie cutters with this type of recipe but you can make them in any shape you like. Good picks to start with are basic Christmas trees, circles that you can decorate like tree ornaments, hearts, angels and don’t forget mans best friend .. be sure to make a couple of gingerbread dog bones for your favorite pooch.
These will keep for up to two weeks if you wrap them when you’ve decorated them. You can pop them into plastic zipper storage bags but I wouldn’t freeze them. When ever I tried to freeze them they ended up being rock hard after they thawed; if you like crunchy cookies than this might be something that you’ll want to do for a snack after the holidays. If you want a cute treat to take to work or to send off to school, consider making mini gingerbread people; you can decorate them with a couple of eyes and a piece of licorice for a smile and make a ton of them in no time at all. People have this notion that making gingerbread cookies takes forever when in fact, the recipe is simple to make and they take almost no time to bake. So stop wasting all that money on store bought cookies ... enlist the kids to help out with cutting out the figures and decorating them and put some quality back into the phrase “quality time”!
As always, thanks for the read!
~^V^~ Freak ~^V^~
© 2005 Freak369
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