DIY: Gingerbread Family

After chatting on the Ravlery message boards for less than five minutes, I was taken by an uncontrollable desire to bake christmas style goodies 

(this may or may not be because one of the main topics of conversation over there is food...)

One small message before I begin to let you know how to make gingerbread cookies:

WARNING: GINGERBREAD COOKIE DOUGH IS YUMMY SCRUMPTIOUS.  YOU MAY HAVE LITTLE LEFT FOR COOKIES.

Whew.  Ok warning over.  Cookie cooking commence :D

You will need:

• 380g plain flour
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 3 tsp mixed spice
• one lump of ginger (around 3cm long?) - grated
• 140g butter
• 135g dark brown sugar
• 130ml golden syrup (that's corn syrup in the USA!)
• 1 egg yolk

Step 1: Grate your ginger.  Or chop into teeny tiny pieces of mush.

Step 2: Pop the flour, bicarbonate of soda, mixed spice and ginger together in a bowl.  mix.

Step 3: Put the butter and brown sugar into your main mixing bowl and beat until creamy.

Step 4: Add the egg yolk and golden syrup to the sugar/butter mix in your large bowl. Stir.

Step 5: Add the flour/spices from your smaller bowl into your main mixing bowl with the butter/sugar and mix until everything is well mixed.  You should be able to pick this up in your hands (like bread dough).

Handy Tip: squash your dough flattish and pop it into the freezer for ten minutes, it's far easier to work with if its cold.

Step 6: Heat the oven to 180 degrees Celcius

Step 7:  Flour the worktop and roll the dough to around a half centimetre.  Cut out your gingerbread family!

If you don't flour your surface enough, you will find yourself peeling gingerbread men from worktops like so...

Step 8:  Bake gingerbread for 10 minutes.  You don't want it to go brown or you will have very crunchy biscuits.  Unless you would rather crunchy than chewy biscuits, then you should let them go a little brown.

Viola!  Mounds of little ginger men.  nom.

Once they've cooled, you can put icing onto your gingerbreads!    The icing is made with ~150g of icing sugar and a couple of teaspoons of water.  I also added a few drops of peppermint flavouring to make minty icing!

This is what I fully intended to do.

However, once my partner got involved in the cake decorating, we ended up recreating gingerbread scenes from popular films.

I apologise for the lack of pretty pictures, but perhaps you'll find it funny instead.

"The day Spider-Man got peckish"