Makes around 20 filled gingerbreads
Ingredients:
- 130g honey (good quality, if possible)
- 85g unsalted butter
- 50g light muscovado sugar
- 65g caster sugar
- 30g Polish gingerbread spice* or mixed spice
- 70g sour cream
- 3g baking soda
- 2 egg yolks
- 330g plain flour
- 15g cocoa
- Plum jam**
Decoration:
- 80g milk chocolate
- 20g dark chocolate
OR
- Icing sugar
Instructions:
- Place honey, butter, both sugars and mixed spice in a saucepan and cook over a low heat, stirring from time to time until combined and most of the sugar dissolves. Once done, set it aside for now to let it cool.
- In a small bowl mix the sour cream with baking soda.
- Place the flour, cocoa, egg yolks, sour cream with baking soda and the cooled honey and butter mixture in a large bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer and mix everything together until combined. The dough will be quite sticky.
- Transfer the dough onto some cling film and wrap the cling film around it. Place in the fridge for at least 4 hours – preferably overnight. The dough will become easy to work with and roll once it had time to ‘rest’.
- Prepare your rolling station! Grab a rolling pin, a heart shaped cookie cutter (mine is almost 6cm) along with a circle one (around 7cm). Lightly flour the surface you’re going to be working on.
- Preheat the oven to 180C – no fan.
- I find it easiest to divide the dough into 4 parts. Roll the first part to about 3-4mm thickness.
- Gently press the heart shaped cookie cutter around the rolled out dough – not all the way through, just enough to make an outline to know where to put the jam soon. Make sure to leave spaces between the hearts. See photos below.
- In the middle of each heart, place about half a teaspoon of plum jam or any other jam of your choice!
- Roll out the second part of the dough and cut out circles using the round cutter.
- Lightly water the edge of each circle using your fingertip and place the cut out circle over each heart with jam. Press the dough around the jam to help it ‘seal’ better and then cut out the heart with the jam being in the middle of the cutter.
- Place the filled hearts on a baking tray lined with baking paper – leaving space between them as they do spread a little in the oven.
- Bake for about 10mins and leave to cool for a few minutes and then transfer onto a wire rack.
- Put together the scraps of dough with the other parts before rolling and repeat the above steps.
- When cool, melt both chocolates together and dip each of the gingerbreads into the chocolate. I always only do the front side. If you don’t want to or don’t have the time to cover them with chocolate, you can just sprinkle them with icing sugar and they will be delicious too! Or do a mix of both!
You can store them in a cookie tin. To keep them soft for longer, you can add some apple peel to the tin, remove old peels and add new every 2-3 days.
Happy Christmas baking!
*I always use a Polish gingerbread spice mix which you can get in the Polish shops. The Polish spice mix does not contain ginger and no, the Polish name for gingerbreads has no ginger in the name. 😉 You can simply use mixed spice instead.
** I use homemade plum jam (it’s quite sour!), but sadly, I don’t have the recipe because my lovely aunt made it for me. I’d recommend to use one that doesn’t have a lot of sugar though! Not an ad, but I am a big fan of St Dalfour jams as they don’t add any extra sugar.
