Gingerbread cookies

It is SO cold here (-1 when I left the house) that its really unpleasant. I really really dislike cold weather, but it does make the festive season really quite Chirstmassy. One only has to consider the number of Christmas markets available for visiting (we chose Zurich; more on that another day) and look at the crazy lights on Regent St / Oxford St to get an idea of how hectic Christmas really is in Europe. The best thing of course is that its the season to be watching Love Actually again!

Anyway back to the food... I was sitting solo in my local Pho Cafe (yes its actually called that) munching on pho and spring rolls tonight - the food isn't particularly awesome but its local and I do like the flower tea they have there (this is the jasmine one); its so pretty!



As I was eating my thoughts turned to chocolate cookies and gingerbread for no apparent reason. Since the house is stocked with supplies for making both, I wandered home thinking I'd decide then, but as I walked past Starbucks I saw the gingerbread latte sign --> time for gingerbread. I haven't made gingerbread for years, but it occurred to me that I should try and improve on the disappointing dry tasting one from Munich (see the last picture of  this post) at some stage. There's no family favourite for gingerbread so I went over to google Nigella Lawson's one and compared it with the one in my Stephanie Alexander book. Is it just me, or is it weird that in both of these recipes there is no actual ginger in gingerbread??? I decided to put some in anyway for good riddance - the spices are practically identical to those used in pumpkin pie or pumpkin spice latte.

Fortunately for me, gingerbread is pretty simple and there's not a lot of ingredients and measuring which immediately sold me to making it. Its another one of those lovely things where the ingredients just fit on the table nicely and there's even room for Stormy my toy mini schnauzer to sneak in the photo behind them.



 

Kate's gingerbread recipe (adapted from Nigella):

Ingredients

• 1 cup of flour


• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder


• 1/2 teaspoon each (around 2 shakes of the spice bottle) of cinnamon and ginger


• 1/4 teaspoon each (around 1 shake of the spice bottle) cloves, all spice, nutmeg


• 60g butter


• 1/4 cup brown sugar


• 1 egg


• 2 tablespoons golden syrup (or honey if you don't have any)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 170 degrees


2. Cream together butter and sugar


3. Add in egg and golden syrup (or honey) and keep mixing


4. Add in flour and spices and combine to make a ball of soft dough (there's really no need to be precious about measuring out the spices)


5. Roll it out on a floured surface and cut out shapes (you may need to put the dough in the freezer for a few minutes if its too soft to work with). I tried manually cutting out Christmas trees initially but then decided it was too much hard work for a Thursday night so I ended up grabbing the baking powder lid and using it as a cookie cutter (no idea where my cookie cutter set went... either left it in Sydney or lost it in the shipping somewhere!)


6. Bake for 5-10 min till golden on top (I'm sorry I can't be more precise on the timing of this - our oven is a bit funny with temperatures so its a guesstimate plus keeping an eye on it!)

Note that this isn't a particularly sweet gingerbread; I think most people like to eat theirs with icing. Since I'm not a royal icing fan (I don't feel the love for using raw egg whites in my icing... I'm going to have to get over this one day), I made a lemon glaze instead.

Lemon glaze - No measurements required, simply take a few big spoons of icing sugar, add a few drops of lemon juice and mix with a spoon (I do recommend always adding the lemon juice to the sugar and not the other way round - this way you can control the consistency / runnyness / thickness without wasting an excessive amount of sugar).

By the way, this is the first time I've baked cookies using a silicon mat and I can report that its completely superduper. There's absolutely zero sticking and no baking paper required! No idea how I have only discovered this in the last 6 months!

Mr T decided it would be fun to dye the glaze different colours so we could have a proper edible Christmas tree - here is the resulting kindergarten style artwork. The round face is meant to be a replica of Heath Ledger's joker face (Mr T just got back from a Xmas party where he dressed up as Heath Ledger's version of the joker) and the bottom round one is a tree on an island with a plane going past.



Finally, all the photos today have (perhaps obviously) been Instagrammed, as one camera is in for repairs and the SD card is missing from the other camera - what do you think? I actually don't mind it since its something a little different from my norm. In fact, I might even use this a little more often for happy snaps of food ...

Till next time, Happy Eating everyone!