This recipe makes around 35 gingerbread cookies
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
Royal Icing Decoration:
- 40g egg white
- 160g icing sugar
- Lemon juice
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 and some Christmas cookie cutters. Lightly flour the surface you’re going to be working on.
- Preheat the oven to 180C – no fan and line the baking tray with some baking paper.
- Take the dough out of the fridge. I find it easiest to divide the dough into 3 parts.
- Roll the first part to about 4mm thickness. Cut out different shapes using the cookie cutters and transfer them onto the prepared baking paper. Make sure to leave some space between the cookies as they do spread a little.
- Bake them for about 8-9mins, 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.
- Decoration is up to you. You can leave these gingerbread cookies as they are, decorate with royal icing, icing sugar or melted chocolate.
Royal Icing
- Using the paddle attachment, mix together the egg whites with sifted icing sugar for about 10 minutes until the mixture turns glossy and is thick enough to pipe out. If it’s too runny, add some more icing sugar. If it’s too thick, add a few drops of lemon juice.
- Transfer to a piping bag (a disposable one works best for this as you can just throw it away when done to avoid cleaning all the mess!) and just snip a very tiny bit off at the end.
- Decorate each gingerbread with as little or as much royal icing as you like!
- Store these gingerbread cookies 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 ones 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.
