Gingerbread Cookies

Gingerbread man cookies 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 a delicious sweet, because when made with the traditional recipe they are loaded with many spices , which gives them a great aroma and flavor.

Like many cookies, making them is really simple: the cookie dough is very simple, and it's just a matter of mixing the ingredients, without any need for technique or much grace. What is important in cookies is:

• Leave the dough in the refrigerator for at least one hour before shaping and baking.
• Remove them from the oven when you see that they are starting to take on a golden color in certain areas of the cookies, since they are at the ideal point to remove them (even though they are soft, because they will finish hardening outside the oven).

And if you want to make authentic and cute gingerbread men, the ideal thing is to use a good mold, with a simple but well-defined shape, so that 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 what beautiful cookies you make! Since it's a silicone mold, you can remove them very easily and without breaking them.

All that's left for you to decide is what to do with the cookies: whether to put them in a bag or a nice box and give them to your friends and family, whether to hang them on the tree... Or whether to surprise your family at the next breakfast! What's certain is that the house will smell like delicious Christmas.

Lurch Gingerbread Cookie Mold

Ingredients

• 280 g of flour
• 1⁄2 tsp baking soda
• 1.5 tsp ginger powder
• 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
• 80 g softened butter
• 50 g of honey
• 40 g of sugar
• 1 large egg
• 70 g beetroot syrup (can be substituted with agave syrup)
• 1 tbsp water
• 1 or 2 tbsp cocoa powder

Preparation

1. Before you start, preheat the oven to 170º C.
2. In a bowl, mix together the softened butter, honey, sugar, one egg, beetroot syrup or agave syrup, water, all the spices and salt until smooth.
3. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with the cocoa and baking soda, and pour them into the first bowl with the butter mixture.
4. Knead well until you get a consistent dough.
5. Once you have the dough ready, pour it into the holes of the Lurch gingerbread cookie mold and smooth it out with a spatula.
6. Bake for 15 minutes in a fan oven at 160°C (without fan at 175°C).
7. When they start to brown, remove them from the oven and let them cool on a rack before removing them from the pan.
8. Carefully remove from the molds and decorate as desired with frosting, chocolate, food coloring pencils, sugar or other toppings.

Grades

• If you want to decorate your cookies with cookie icing, I invite you to read this post in which we tell you how to do it.
• You can definitely use the mold with other cookie recipes, but it is important to add at most a pinch of baking soda, not baking powder, because you want the dough not to rise too much when baking, so that the cookie takes on the nice relief and shape of the mold.
• When the dough is still soft in the oven, you can make a hole in the dough so you can thread a string through it to hang them from the Christmas tree. You can also put them in transparent bags and hang them from the tree . This will be the ideal detail and will keep them well preserved so you can eat them on different days during Christmas.