Gingerbread For Christmas

Being Christmas Eve, today I'm going to share my gingerbread recipe with you, gingerbread, which I've been planning to make for a couple of years and never did. This year I made it a priority and even though the results are not what I was hoping for, I'm ok with it.

If you're following me and have been reading my post, you most likely have seen gingerbread photos on my blog. It's very common in my country and you can buy a great variety. I've been admiring them and each time I saw one was thinking it would be nice to try it out and learn to create such beauty. Obviously who has ever made gingerbread knows it's not exactly simple to create some thing decent, but if it would be easy, there would be no challenge in it, right? So yesterday I tried my hand at making gingerbread and here's the result.

I have this recipe from an ex colleague of mine, I have no idea where his wife got it from, so again, I'm going to quote it without source as it's not mine.

Ingredients

100ml honey,

150ml milk (1.5% fat),

50g butter,

10g vanilla sugar,

1tbs cinnamon,

1/2 tbs sodium bicarbonate,

450g flour,

200g sugar.

Ingredients for the coating

1 egg white,

200g sugar,

candy or chocolate granulate.

The funny thing is that I bought this spatula half a year ago, it has a gingerbread man on it. I did not want this design as I wanted something simple and for cooking and was afraid of that paint on the spatula, but this was the only one available at that store at a good price. Now the time has come to use it for making gingerbread. I love it by the way and the paint is still on.

The method is pretty simple but there are a couple of things you need to pay attention to as things can go wring quickly with this recipe.

Put the milk, vanilla sugar, cinnamon, sugar, butter and honey in the pot, mix well and stir till everything melts.

This recipe says 450g flour. What you see on the photo with the ingredients is a special flour for gingerbread. I saw that online at some point but did not buy it because it was not cheap and I didn't think gingerbread needs a special flour. Then my dad gifted me a pack of 1 kg. You can guess why 😂 So I looked at the ingredients to see what's so special about it and saw it has 20% rye flour. Ok, I have rye flour at home, could have made a mix myself but it's ok.

The cinnamon makes the dough pretty brown but it's ok, no need to worry. So I added everything to the mixing bowl and let the mixer knead for a few minutes.

And here comes the trick. The secret of a good gingerbread is to work fast with the dough. Once the dough starts to cool off, the honey starts to harden and that is the end of your dream to make a nice gingerbread. So you need to work fast, spread the dough till it's still hot.

This was my dough after kneading.

I spread the dough out quickly. It has to be around 3mm thick.

I have those forms for ages and I have another set made of stainless steal, but only took out these. Then I did not know which one to use as butterfly has nothing to do with Christmas, Santa was curvy and not suitable for the job, so I put those aside and went with the rest.

Baking time was again a stressful puzzle. You need to be very careful as these can easily burn and if you over bake them, they will be hard like a rock. With my old oven i knew what to do, but with the new one ...

So what does Erikah do in these situations? Fake it till you make it, what else? 😂 I decided to go with 15 minutes at 170C and voilà! Just perfect!

After that, i beat the egg white with the sugar, to get a thick coating.

And this is where I broke my own rule! When I'm cooking or baking, I'm always trying to create something healthy as otherwise what's the point, right? So one of my principles in the kitchen is to not use colorants. Yet, I bought these at the beginning of December and broke my own rule.

Seeing those lovely gingerbread at the market, I thought it would be nice to do things differently for a change and use some colors. Otherwise I always use just white sugar coating and candies, or just the white sugar coating.

So this year I thought I'd color the hearts red and maybe the flowers too, then the Christmas trees could be green, the moon yellow and so on. For the start i picked up the red one and mixed a small part of the white sugar coat with the red colorant.

Imagine my disappointment, when instead of red, I got an ugly, pale pink. I even forgot to take photos. Most likely the gingerbread sellers are using a different type of colorants as their red is so vivid.

After I saw the outcome, the best thing to do was to go with the boring white as t was still far better than some pale color.

This is top quality dark chocolate granulate, but I call it mouse sht. If you've ever seen mouse sht, you understand what I mean 😂

And voilà! I must admit, the implementation looks awful. I don't have the proper tools for this and was dead tired already, so ...

However, after a night of rest, the coating looks more even.

This is the pink heart, that supposed to be read.

The flower.

The Christmas tree.

And the moon.

I had a chat with @incublus a while ago, as he doesn't like ginger. I told him there's gingerbread without ginger as well and voilà 😂 here it is. It is made with cinnamon only.

As a conclusion, there's room fro improvement here, as far as the decoration goes. Next time I have to do better.

So which one would you pick from hear? Do you want my heart, the Christmas tree, a moon, some stars?

Whatever you choose, Merry Christmas everyone!

If you're a newbie, you may want to check out these guides: