The gingerbread man cookies or gingerbread man have undoubtedly become a symbol of Christmas, and they are a perfect detail to decorate the Christmas tree, to give as a gift —or to enjoy! They are an extremely delicious sweet, because when made with the traditional recipe they are loaded with many spices, which give them a great aroma and flavor.
Like so many cookies, making them is really simple: the cookie dough is very basic, and it’s a matter of mixing the ingredients, without needing technique or much flair. What is important with the cookies is:
- Leave the dough in the fridge for at least an hour before shaping and baking.
- Take them out of the oven when you see they start to take on a golden color in certain areas of the cookies, as that is the ideal time to remove them (even if they’re still soft, because they will finish hardening outside the oven).
And if what you want is to make authentic and super-cute gingerbread men, what’s ideal is to use a good mold, with a simple but well-defined shape, so you get perfect little men. In this case, I recommend the Lurch mold, which with its little buttons and marked boots, will make perfect cookies, you’ll see how beautiful cookies you make! Since the mold is silicone, you’ll be able to unmold them very easily and without breaking them.
You’ll only have to decide what to do with the cookies: whether to put them in a bag or a pretty box and gift them to your friends and family, hang them on the tree... Or surprise your family at the next breakfast! What is certain is that the house will smell like delicious Naidad.
Gingerbread Cookie Mold by Lurch
Ingredients
- 280 g of flour
- 1⁄2 tsp baking soda
- 1.5 tsp ground ginger
- 1/2 tsp allspice
- 3/4 tsp star anise (or green anise)
- 1/2 tsp cardamom
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp cloves
- 1/2 tsp black pepper
- 1/4 tsp nutmeg
- (optional) 1 tsp gingerbread spice mix
- 80 g softened butter
- 50 g honey
- 40 g sugar
- 1 large egg
- 70 g beet syrup (can be substituted with agave syrup)
- 1 tbsp water
- 1 or 2 tbsp cocoa powder
Preparation
- Before you start, preheat the oven to 170º C.
- In a bowl, mix the softened butter, honey, sugar, one egg, beet syrup or agave syrup, water, all the spices and the salt in a bowl until you obtain a smooth mixture.
- In another separate bowl, mix the flour with the cocoa and the baking soda, and pour them into the first bowl with the butter mixture.
- Knead well until you form a consistent dough.
- Once you have the dough ready, pour it into the cavities of the Lurch gingerbread cookie mold and smooth it with the help of a spatula.
- Bake them for 15 minutes, with fan at 160 °C (without fan at 175º C).
- When you see they begin to brown, take them out of the oven and let them cool on a rack before removing them from the mold.
- Unmold them carefully and decorate them to your liking with icing, chocolate, food coloring pens, sugar or another topping.
Notes
- If you want to decorate your cookies with cookie icing, I invite you to see this post in which we tell you how to do it.
- You can use the mold with other cookie recipes, without a doubt!, but it’s important that they include at most a pinch of baking soda, no yeast, because you don’t want the dough to rise too much when baking, so the cookie takes on the mold’s nice relief and shape.
- When the dough is still soft in the oven, you can make a hole in the dough to pass a string through to hang them on the Christmas tree. You can also put them in clear bags and hang those from the tree. It will be the perfect detail and well preserved to eat them over different days during the holidays.
