Gingerbread Cookies

Gingerbread man or 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! It is a most delicious sweet, since they are made with the traditional recipe and are loaded with many spices , which gives them a great aroma and flavor.

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

• Leave the dough for at least an hour in the fridge before shaping and baking.
• Take them out of the oven when we see that they begin to take on a golden color in certain areas of the cookies, as they are at the ideal point to remove them (even though they are soft, because they will just harden out of the oven).

And if what you want is to make authentic and cute gingerbread men, what is ideal is to use a good mold, with a simple but well-defined shape, so that there are perfect little men. In this case, I recommend the Lurch mold , which with its little buttons and marked boots, will make perfect cookies , you will see what beautiful cookies you make! Being the silicone mold, you can remove them very easily and without breaking them.

You will only have to decide what you do with the cookies, if you put them in a bag or a nice box and give them to your friends and family, if you hang them from the tree... Or if you surprise your family at the next breakfast! What is certain is that the house will smell of delicious Naidad.

Lurch Gingerbread Cookie Cutter

Ingredients

• 280g 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
• 50g honey
• 40g sugar
• 1 large egg
• 70 g beetroot syrup (can be substituted with agave syrup)
• 1 tbsp water
• 1 or 2 tablespoons of cocoa powder

Preparation

1. Before you start, preheat the oven to 170º C.
2. In a bowl, mix the softened butter, honey, sugar, one egg, beetroot syrup or agave syrup, water, all the spices and salt in a bowl until smooth.
3. In a separate bowl, mix the flour with the cocoa and bicarbonate of soda, and pour 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 in the Lurch gingerbread mold and smooth it out with the help of a spatula.
6. Bake it for 15 minutes, in an oven with air at 160 °C (airless at 175º C.
7. When you see that they start to brown, take them out of the oven and let them cool on a rack before removing them from the mold.
8. Unmold carefully and decorate as desired with icing, chocolate, food colored pencils, sugar, or other icing.

Grades

• 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 is interesting that they incorporate a maximum of a pinch of bicarbonate, no yeast, because it is important that the dough does not grow much when baking, so that the cookie takes on the beautiful relief and mold shape.
• When the dough is still soft in the oven, you can make a hole in the dough, to be able to pass a thread to hang them from the Christmas tree. You can also put them in transparent bags, and hang these from the tree . It will be the ideal and well-preserved detail to eat them on different days during Christmas.