First Christmas Baking: Gingerbread Men & Women
Sunday, December 07, 2014
For the first advent last Sunday I decided to finally do some Christmas baking and make my first batch of biscuits. I decided to follow a German recipe for Pfefferkuchen or Lebkuchen so I ventured out to get some biscuit cutters in the form of a gingerbread man and a Christmas tree and all the other ingredients I needed and got my bake on!
For this recipe you'll need:
250g honey
125g caster sugar
125g unsalted butter
1/2 pack of gingerbread spice (common in Germany: Lebkuchengewürz which is made of ginger, cloves, cinnamon, aniseed, allspice and nutmeg)
500g flour
1/2 pack of baking powder
1 tbsp cocoa powder
1 medium sized egg
Give the honey, sugar, butter and gingerbread spice into a pot and heat up whilst stirring until the sugar is dissolved and all the ingredients are melted into a nice smelling thick sauce. Be careful not to bring the mixture to a boil!! Leave to cool for about 40 minutes.
In a bowl, mix the flower, baking powder and cocoa powder. Then gradually pour your dry ingredients into the sauce you made while working the mixture with a dough hook. Also add your egg at this point. Eventually it will get rather hard to mix the dough with the hook so you will have to use your hands (hence why you really REALLY should leave your sauce to cool!). Once it's all worked together, form a ball, wrap it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for at least 1 hour (I left mine in for two).
Your dough should now have the perfect consistency to be rolled out! You can now go all wild and cut out biscuits in all forms and shapes. Preheat your oven to 220°C. The first tray of biscuits will need about 10 minutes in the oven, the next only needed 7 minutes and all the following were in the oven for 5 minutes only, so keep checking them to make sure they don't over bake.
After your biscuits are completely cooled down, you can start decorating them with writing icing, hundreds and thousands or jellied fruit - whatever takes your fancy really. I sticked to the writing icing this time!
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| Not the most festive of gingerbread men.. |
Yup and that is all there is to do! A super simple recipe for delicious German Lebkuchenmänner or gingerbread men (and women ;-) ) Let me know if you try them at home and maybe even tweet me a picture of your gingerbread army on twitter @JessRetrospect .
Have you started with your Christmas baking yet? Tell me in the comments what your favourite Christmas biscuits are! I'd love to find some new recipes to try!
Love,
Jess x
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2 Kommentare
Those look so so nice! Can't wait to try these at home for Christmas :) Thanks for sharing!! Xxx
ReplyDeletehttp://thoughtsintiffanyblue.blogspot.com/
Thank you! Glad you liked them! Have fun making them ;) xx
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