It is simply impossible to confuse ginger cookies with any other: only its inherent rosy color and spicy smell create a truly magical atmosphere that adds charisma to such baked goods. And if you complement this combination with monograms made of multi-colored glaze, then you can safely call yourself, if not a chef, then at least a decorating genius. Can you already imagine how deliciously you crunch ginger cookies and how your family rejoices at your culinary masterpiece? So let's make those fantasies come true with one of our step-by-step recipes!
A classic recipe for gingerbread cookies for the New Year's table
After all, ginger cookies are primarily associated with cold winter evenings and hot aromatic tea, so the peak of its popularity falls just on the New Year holidays, because these cute cookies not only complement the holiday table, but are also a budget-friendly and at the same time soulful hand-made product - a gift. How will the Christmas gingerbread cookie recipe be different from others? Of course, lots of spices! Ingredients:
- Flour 250 grams.
- Butter 120 grams.
- Sugar 100 grams.
- Honey 50 grams.
- Egg 1 pc.
- Baking powder 1 tsp.
- Ground cinnamon 1 tsp.
- Ground ginger 1 tsp.
- Cardamom 0.5 tsp.
- Zest 1-2 tsp.
- Cocoa 1 tsp.
- Nutmeg pinch.
Honey will give the cookies a golden hue, but if you want a richer brown color, you can't do without tinting them with brown sugar or cocoa
Preparation:
- Soft butter must be mixed with sugar, melted honey and egg until smooth. Just be careful not to overheat the honey, otherwise the egg may curdle!
- In a large bowl, mix flour, baking powder, cocoa, zest and spices. It is very convenient to use dried factory-produced zest, but during the New Year there is nothing better than zest extracted from tangerine peels.
- Gradually add the dry mixture into the liquid mixture, rubbing the dough with a fork until the consistency of large pellets. Large pellets should easily form a tight ball: only this dough will produce Christmas gingerbread cookies with a beautiful, even outline.
- The dough needs to be kept in the refrigerator for about an hour, wrapped in plastic wrap, after which it is rolled out, the cookies themselves are cut out with molds, repeating the rolling 3-4 times, and baked on a baking sheet covered with baking paper for about 7 minutes at 180˚C.
That's all! Cookies can be served. The basic recipe doesn't seem all that complicated, does it? Even a novice cook can really make these cookies at home, but they will be even tastier if you enlist the tips and tricks that we are ready to share.
How to make Gingerbread Cookies
Let's prepare the ingredients.
Remove the zest from one lemon and pour into a bowl.
Peel the ginger, grate it on a fine grater and add it to the zest. Make 1 heaped tablespoon of grated ginger.
Pour in sugar.
Place a piece of soft butter. Place the bowl in a water bath and mix everything well.
Beat in the egg and mix everything.
Add flour and baking powder in portions and knead the dough.
Place the dough in the cold for 20 minutes.
The cooled dough became denser. If necessary, add another 1-2 tablespoons of flour and knead the dough with your hands. Separate small parts of the dough, make round pieces and place them on a baking sheet covered with baking paper. Bake in the oven at 180-190 degrees for about 12 minutes.
Cool the cookies. It turns out tender and crumbly.
Enjoy your tea!
Variations of gingerbread cookie recipes from famous chefs
Different famous chefs have different ideas about the perfect gingerbread cookie. Yes, in the recipes below you will find a lot in common, but each of them is unique and includes a couple of cooking subtleties.
Recipe from Yulia Vysotskaya
In her blog, Yulia Vysotskaya describes a recipe that is very similar to the classic one that we have already told you about, with some nuances. She also suggests making ginger cookies with honey and spices:
Ingredients: For 200 grams of flour you will need 100 grams of sugar, 100 grams of butter, 1 egg, 50 grams of honey, one and a half teaspoons of soda instead of baking powder, 2 tsp. ground ginger, 1 tsp. cinnamon and cardamom and half a teaspoon of ground cloves. Yulia also adds a pinch of a mixture of peppers and salt, and also uses brown sugar instead of regular sugar.
To use all of the dough, you will need to roll out the dough 3-4 times, each time collecting the leftovers into a ball.
Preparation: To make gingerbread cookies in the “Cooking at Home” style, you can follow the classic recipe that we described above. The only difference: instead of a fork, a mixer is used, and the cardamom was bought whole in boxes, and not ground, as in the Christmas recipe. Yulia especially advises rolling out the dough thinner directly on baking paper, which is very convenient and will save a lot of time. Moreover, thinner cookies will be more similar to store-bought ones, for example, the weightless Charlize ginger cookies loved by many or the Scottish ginger cookies “Private Gallery”. Only your cookies, unlike factory-made ones, will contain not vegetable oil, but butter and as many spices as you want!
Ginger cookies by Lisa Glinskaya
On Lisa Glinskaya’s blog, ginger cookies are called the beautiful word “pepparkakor” and are prepared for St. Nicholas Day. Her recipe is also similar to the classic one, but mastic is an integral part of it.
Ingredients: For 200 grams of flour, you also take 100 grams of butter, but only 25 grams of sugar and half an egg, so you get more of a dietary gingerbread cookie. But, as in the classic recipe, a lot of zest is used: from a quarter of an orange and half a lemon. There are also less spices: only half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon each of ginger and nutmeg. A quarter teaspoon of baking powder and a pinch of salt are added to the entire mixture.
Preparation: There is one significant difference in this recipe: the butter is added to the dry mixture not soft, but cold straight from the refrigerator, kneaded with flour, sugar and spices until crumbly and then mixed with the egg. Lisa bakes cookies not at 180˚С, but at 170˚С, but we’ll tell you about the mastic recipe from her blog a little lower.
If you poke a hole in the cookies before baking, you can make an edible holiday garland out of them.
Recipe from Andy Chef
The cooking technology from Andy Chef is similar to the previous recipe, but the list of ingredients is slightly different. We said that each chef has his own flavor!
Ingredients: For 175 grams, take 65 grams of butter, 75 grams of powdered sugar, instead of regular sugar, 1 yolk, not a whole egg, 1 tsp. ginger and cinnamon, 30 grams of honey, a quarter teaspoon of soda and a pinch of salt.
Preparation: All dry ingredients, except powdered sugar, are mixed with butter cut into small cubes and kneaded into crumbs by hand. Then add powder, yolk and honey. By the way, Chef Andy believes that flour must be sifted and cookies must be baked at a temperature of 170˚C.
Flat biscuits rise when baked, but after a few minutes they sag and become stale.
Eggless Cookie Recipe
If you are looking for gingerbread cookies with cinnamon from Nadezhda Babkina, then, unfortunately, there is no such recipe on her blog, and it is not clear where the hype around this name came from. But we can talk about gingerbread cookies with honey, but without eggs. In case you are planning to fast or are following a vegetarian diet.
Ingredients: For 200 grams of flour, take 50 grams of sugar, vegetable oil and sweet syrup. For spices, it is enough to take 1 tsp. cardamom, cinnamon and ginger, and 0.5 tsp will serve as a baking powder. soda
Preparation: But here the strategy is completely different: syrup, sugar and spices are mixed and brought to a boil. After removing from the heat, soda and vegetable oil are added to them, and then flour is gradually mixed into the liquid mixture. Cookies are baked at 180˚C for 12-15 minutes, since such dough cannot be rolled out very thin.
Ginger dough without eggs will be a little softer and more pliable, but you need to add flour until it stops sticking to your hands
Ginger cookies with honey
These classic Ikea gingerbread cookies are sure to be made with honey, as the zesty flavor of the root pairs perfectly with the sweet stuff. There are two cooking options - with and without chocolate. We chose the first option, and if you want to make it brown, then for the presented amount of ingredients you need to add half a bar of dark chocolate. Charlize cookies, beloved by many, are also baked using the same recipe.
Cooking time: 30 minutes.
Number of servings: about 30 pieces.
Ingredients:
- 1 glass of honey;
- 1 cup melted butter;
- 1 chicken egg;
- 5 glasses of flour;
- 2 teaspoons baking powder;
- 1 teaspoon ground ginger;
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon;
- Half a teaspoon each of ground cloves and cardamom.
Step-by-step preparation:
- In a large bowl, whisk together the honey and butter until it forms a soft golden cream. Beat the egg and add it to the cream.
- Add flour, powder, ginger, cardamom, cloves and cinnamon to a bowl, blend on medium speed and chill in the refrigerator for at least two hours.
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Line a baking sheet with parchment.
- While the oven is heating up, use your chilled dough to shape the cookies into whatever shape you like. New Year's cookies for Ikea are made in the form of various figures - Christmas trees, snowflakes, snowmen.
- Bake cookies for about 15 minutes. Decorate as you please. One of the options for decorating gingerbread cookies is to pour chocolate icing from melted black, milk and white chocolate.
Serve with a hot drink, enjoy your meal!
And let's not forget about the frosting!
For ordinary everyday life, gingerbread cookies don’t need to be decorated, but if you are preparing them for Valentine’s Day or Christmas, then without painting with icing all the charm will be lost. We will tell you about three methods of preparing glaze, or, as it is also called, icing, based on various products:
On the water
For 150 grams of powdered sugar you will need 2 tsp. lemon juice and a little cold water. This icing will not be pure white and will show through, so it is good for completely covering cookies, but not good for creating patterns. Just slowly mix the liquid with the powder until a drop of glaze begins to hold its shape. It is important not to pour all the liquid into the powder at once: start with 2 tablespoons of juice, and add water as needed and literally drop by drop.
Lemon juice and water can be replaced with milk to “whiten” the glaze a little.
On squirrels
Protein glaze is boiling white, it is great for complex decoration and can be easily tinted with food coloring. For 150 grams of powder you will need 1 egg, or rather the white of one egg. Again, don’t add all the protein at once: add half of it first, beat the mixture with a mixer at maximum speed, and if the consistency is too stiff, add a little more protein. If you are doing both an outline and a fill, then first you need to draw the lines, let them dry and only then fill in the drawing.
For the outline, the glaze should be quite dense, but for filling it is better to add a little more protein
On gelatin
And here is Lisa Glinskaya’s icing recipe: for 150 grams of powder you will need half a teaspoon of gelatin, 1 tbsp. l. water, a quarter of egg white and 1 tsp. vegetable oil and lemon juice. Gelatin is soaked in a small amount of water and dissolved over low heat, all liquid ingredients are mixed, and then gradually added to powdered sugar until the desired consistency is achieved.
Gelatin glaze has a mirror effect and looks very unusual
Now you can make not only delicious, but also creative gingerbread cookies with colorful ornaments and bright paintings: add silver edible balls and other decorations to this, and you will have a great gift for your family and friends!
Gingerbread cookies baked by yourself are definitely better than the most delicious factory baked goods, and not only because you know exactly what ingredients are used in cooking. Homemade cookies are a space for self-realization and creativity, which will reward you for your courage and efforts with a magnificent aroma, spicy taste and delicious crunch accompanied by hot tea or coffee.
