Welcome to How To Cook That
I am Ann Reardon today we are making gingerbread Christmas cookies.
We have a tradition in our family of making a gingerbread house every Christmas.
I showed you how to make the houses last year and had a lot of requests for gingerbread
cookies.
These are easy to make and lots of fun for everyone to get involved in decorating.
To make your gingerbread dough place the butter in a saucepan and melt it over a high heat.
All of the recipe quantities that you need are on the website howtocookthat.net you will
also find a few different gingerbread house designs there and a whole page of ginger bread
house ideas for you to check out.
I'l put a link to this recipe in the description just below this video and that will link to
all the other pages.
Then measure out your sugar and your syrups, I am using a mixture of glucose syrup and
golden syrup you can use some corn syrup, maple syrup or even honey.
Your choices will change the flavour and colour of your cookie dough a little bit but just
substiute equal quantities.
Stir that into the butter over the heat.
Lift up your spoon to see if your sugar is dissolved, here you can still see the sugar
crystals still on the spoon so you need to keep stirring it.
Until it looks clear like this.
Then take it off the heat.
Pour in the milk and stir that through.
Add in the flour and sift in the ground ginger, cloves, bicarb and cinnamon.
The reason i am sifting them is to make sure we don't get any little lumps of spice in
one spot.
And then stir that through well, one of the things I like about this recipe is you don't
need electric mixers with a dough hook like lots of the ginger bread recipes do.
Spread some plastic wrap onto the bench and then tip out your mixture.
At this stage it will be soft, sticky and gooey like this.
Wrap it up in the plastic wrap and leave it at room temperature to cool.
Once it is cooled it will be the right consistency to roll it out roll it out so roll it on some
baking paper.
And then use some cookie cutters to cut out your shapes.
And if you don't have any cutters you can just print out shapes onto paper and use them
as a template and cut around it using a knife.
Then remove the excess dough, you can roll that out later to make more cookies.
or just cut out squares using a ruler.
This amount of dough makes approximately 50 cookies it depends on the shapes and sizes
that you are making.
Slide the paper onto a baking tray and place them in the oven at 180 degrees for about
12 minutes.
The time will vary depending on the thickness you roll your dough and size of your cookies.
Once you can smell that gingerbread smell wafting through the room they are probably
done.
If you are baking squares you'll need to take it out of the oven and redo the cuts straight
away, the gingerbread is still quite soft when it first comes out of the oven but will
firm up quickly as it cools.
To make your icing you will need icing sugar or confectioners sugar, powdered egg white,
or if you can't get hold of that then meringue or pavlova mix are both fine and some water.
Mix the egg white into the icing sugar then add most of the water.
If you are using powdered egg white you will probably need nearly all of the water but
if you are using pavlova mix you'll need a bit less.
Then mix on medium speed for about 5 minutes.
Stop the mixer and lift up the beaters if it is ready it should have soft peaks that
just bend over slightly when you lift it up like this.
Split the mixture into as many bowls as you want colours.
And mix through some gel food colouring.
If you want pastel colours then liquid colour would be fine but if you want stronger colours
you will need to use the stronger gel colours.
I am using red, white and green for these cookies.
If you do want black then you will need to mix in some cocoa powder and then lots of
black food coloring.
Scoop it into a piping bag or you can use a ziplock bag.
And cut a tiny bit off the end so that you get a thin continuous stream of icing when
you squeeze the bag.
Draw an outline on you cookies, if you want areas of different colours then draw a border
to seperate them out too.
You can use the same colour for the outline as you are going to use for the middle section
or you can use a contrasting colour for the outline.
And of course you can use more than one colour on each cookie to outline different ares as
well.
Once you have finished outlining let them rest for about 5 minutes and then take some
of the icing mix some water in with it.
Now you want to add a few drops at a time.
You want it to be runny enough to meld down into itself when you drizzle some from a spoon.
But you don't want it to be too watery.
If it is too watery once it has been on the cookie it will soak in and it will leave it
looking strange.
Add some onto the cookie and then use a toothpick to spread it out to the edges and into all
those little corners.
Tap the cookie a few times to smooth it our and release any air bubbles.
If you want to you can of course add decorations to the wet icing, on these green christmas
trees I ma using some mini m&m's.
Then you can repeat that for your other colours.
To avoid the colours running into each other if you want you cookies perfect then let each
colour dry before adding the next one.
Once the icing is fairly dry you can go back and pipe more details over the top.
I used the rest of my dough to make a nativity scene which I will show you closer to christmas.
Thanks for your suggestions subscribe for more desserts, chocolate and cake decorating
tutorials and add all your request in the comments below.
Have a great week, I'll see you Friday.