Let's Make Some Gingerbread Cookies!

Hello honeys
Hope you're well and staying warm. It was so, so cold last night on the way home from work.  Now it's usually around now that I start bugging everyone with my heartfelt desire to toddle off to bed with a hot water bottle (and our furbaby Jade too, she doesn't like winter at all! I'm sure she'd want to hibernate with her mum.)  Why shouldn't we be allowed to hibernate till it's safe for us to sit out in the garden again? 

I'm not a fan of winter honeys.  The constant darkness and cold, rainy days, or chilly winds that feel like they could cut me in two just wear me down and play havoc with my arthritis.  I'm a Summer baby! I need sunshine, I need to wake up to the sun streaming through the windows and know I can hang out laundry 😊

What to do though dear ones?  We're stuck in December and other than to hibernate like a wee bear and countdown till spring - which I've already been doing for a while now actually.  The counting down that is, not the hibernating unfortunately 😊  Here in the UK it will be exactly 15 weeks from tonight till the clocks go forward again and we start running towards summer yaaaaay!!!  

Fifteen weeks isn't so long really but in the meantime all that can be done with winter is to make the best of it 😊  One bonus of being in December is that gingerbread seems to be everywhere and what could be better than sitting down with a lovely, hot, creamy mug of hot chocolate and a gingerbread cookie? 

What if you made the yummy gingerbread cookies yourself?  What if they were so easy to make you could make batches of them up for gifting too?  Share the yummy gingerbread love!  Choose a pretty container, line with a paper lace doily fill with your delicious home-made cookies and everyone will love them 😊

Honestly, these heavenly cookies couldn't be any easier to make and they taste sooooo good! All of the mixing I leave to my little mixer :) Just chuck in the ingredients and then turn out your dough, roll and bake :)  They take no time to prepare, they're so much fun to make, why not let tiny humans help?  Such fun rolling out the dough and using assorted cookie cutters to make their favourite shapes.  

Best of all, you can run up a few batches and store in an airtight container and they'll keep for over the holidays.  As I said they're also fabulous for gifting too. Who wouldn't love to be given a fabulous package of these yummy gingerbread treats?

They only take 8-10 minutes to bake too, so once they're in the oven you can make a lovely cuppa and by the time that's done they're ready to come out of the oven.  Shall we make some cookies honeys?  To the kitchen! 

Yummiest Ever Gingerbread Cookies!

Ingredients:

85g brown sugar
125g unsalted butter
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
3 teaspoons of ground ginger
375g plain flour (sifted)
175 ml golden syrup

Directions:

1. Pre-heat your oven to 180c

2. Into your mixer (or large mixing bowl) place your brown sugar and butter. Beat together until combined and creamy.

3. Once your sugar and butter are well mixed, add to the bowl (or your mixer which if, like me, you have painful, arthritic wrists is definitely the way to go) your plain flour (sifted), ginger, bicarbonate of soda and your golden syrup.  Mix until very well combined.

4. Turn out your gingerbread dough and place it into a tub or sandwich bag and into the fridge for 15-20 minutes, more if you can.  This lets your dough "rest" as the more it's handled the stickier it becomes. The more chilled it is, the easier it is to roll out and work with.

5. Once chilled, cut two pieces of grease proof paper or baking parchment and place your dough between the paper sheets and roll out.  The less you touch the dough the better, since the heat from your hands will make it very sticky and unworkable.  Use your favourite cookie cutters and have fun cutting out your cookies.

6. Bake your cookies for 8-10 minutes until a lovely golden brown. Remove (carefully) from the oven and gently place onto a wire cooling rack. I use a silicone spatula to do this as the cookies are still very fragile when first removed from the oven.

7. I like to sift a little icing sugar over the top of my cookies but they're still delicious without it :)

8. Sit down, put your feet up with a lovely cuppa and enjoy!

So honeys, as you can see, it's so easy to make our lovely gingerbread dough, and once that's done, the fun begins :) what do we do with it?  Tiny humans will have such fun choosing the cookie cutter shapes to use. Why not make some gingerbread men and then decorate them using icing with Santa hats or Elf costumes?

I made this Christmas Wreath cookie, well, it is December after all :) I'm quite pleased at how it turned out...

   

To make the wreath cookie, I used a larger round cookie cutter (I used the sort with a serrated edge rather than the smooth edge) to cut the main cookie shape and then used the smallest round cutter in the set to cut out the middle.  I then pushed in little sugar roses (normally used to decorate the tops of cupcakes) around the edge.  Lastly before placing it into the oven to bake, I made a little hole at the top edge, just big enough to later thread through a ribbon as I have in the photo.  This then allows you to hang them from your Christmas tree 🎄

Having had fun cutting out cookie shapes, my shoulders and spine started to ache and I placed my gingerbread dough back into the fridge (after wrapping it in cling film/saran wrap) while I went away and got my pain meds.  It's so not fun being a spoonie at times. The rest of my cookie dough was later used to make these assorted plain round cookies. Maybe not so creative but just as delicious 😋

Another tip, I prefer my cookies to be "chewy" where hubby prefers his to be thinner and crispier and this can be easily achieved by adjusting the thickness of your cookies. The thicker the cookie the chewier it will be, the thinner the crispier. 

So that's it honeys, I do hope that you try some of these delicious cookies, they're perfect for cheering up a dull day, for gifting when visiting over the holidays or just to impress guests by having homemade cookies when offering a coffee 😊

Whatever you have planned for this weekend, do stay warm dear ones, have fun, smile lots and hug even more.  Till next time, sending heaps of huggles xx