What’s Cooking – Christmas Gingerbread Man Cookies

The Christmas season is in a full bloom so it is time to get some festive food ready. What can be more festive than some tasty little gingerbread cookies?

The recipe I want to share with you today is from The Christmas 3D Cookie Kit from Parragon. The kit contains 3D cookie cutters (so you can make your own 3D snowman and 3D Christmas tree) and a recipe book with a fantastic selection of Christmas cookies.

The recipe I’ve chosen was originally for a Mini Gingerbread House Cookies, but we thought that a gingerbread man shaped cookies will be a better choice 🙂

Ingredients:

125g butter

2tbp golden syrup

175g light muscovado sugar

300g self-rising flour

2tbsp ground ginger

1 large egg

Method:

Prepare 2 large baking sheets, ideally pre-lined with a baking paper.

Heat the oven to 160C.

Place the butter and the golden syrup in a pan and heat gently, stirring all the time until melted.

Remove the pan from the heat, add sugar and stir until dissolved.

Sift the flour and ginger into a large bowl and make a well in the middle ready for the wet ingredients.

Pour in the warm, wet ingredients and add the beaten egg into the mix.

Stir thoroughly to form a smooth dough.

Wrap it in a cling film and chill in the fridge for about 20 minutes.

Remove your dough from the fridge and prepare to roll it out; ideally you want your rolled dough to be about 5mm thick.

Cut desired shapes using a cookie cutter or an upside down glass if you want to make a classic round shape or even a knife if all else fails.

Transfer your cut cookies to your baking sheets.

Chill in the fridge for a further 10 minutes.

Bake in earlier preheated oven for about 12-15 minutes or until firm and lightly brown.

Remove from the oven and allow them to cool down.

Now the fun can begin…

It is time to decorate!

If you are good with decorating you can make your own royal icing (just mix 150g of icing sugar with 2tsp of white egg powder and 2 tbsp of cold water)… I am not a master decorator so we used shop bought icing pens to make this job easier 😉

Happy baking!

What’s Cooking – Quick and Easy Cinnamon Biscuits

From time to time we all get cravings, sometimes we can satisfy them, sometimes we can’t. One day last week sometime around 11pm I developed a huge craving to have some fresh baked cookies. We had guests over so it wasn’t exactly sleeping time yet so we decided to bake something. Obviously we knew that this had to be a quick and easy recipe as no one wanted to start a long preparation process at that time of the night. We settled on a batch of Quick and Easy Cinnamon Biscuits. As there were four people in the kitchen including a fellow foodie blogger Iwona from Smakowite Jadlo, we had a lovely warm biscuits in no time!

So if you ever get that feeling you must have a cookie now, I would highly recommend this recipe.

Ingredients:

• 160g flour
• 120g soft butter
• 3tbs icing sugar
• 1.5tsps cinnamon

Method:

To start preheat your oven to 180C and using some baking parchment line two large baking trays.

In a large bowl mix all your dry ingredients: flour, cinnamon and sugar. Add soften, cubed cutter and combine until you have a nice smoo0th and even dough.

Now depending on the shape of your cookies you can either:

– Form small balls which you will shape into roundish biscuits with your hands.

or (my preferred way)

– Roll your mixture flat using a rolling pin and then just use a cookie cutter to achieve your desired shape.

Bake in your earlier preheated oven for about 15-20 minutes or until firm to the touch.

Remove the biscuits and place on a wire cooling rack so they are allowed to cool.

Decorate if needed or desired.

They are perfect for storing, as long as you put them into an airtight container of course.

Now remember there were four of us in the kitchen and we all wanted something just a little bit different, we just couldn’t seem to settle on just one flavour, biscuits by committee! As it is a democratic household we ended up baking four batches of biscuits in four different flavours 😉 So if cinnamon is not for you, you can try adding some grated almonds or chocolate or dry coconut (our coconut biscuits also had an orange food colouring, I am quite unsure what we were thinking at the time but I suspect that a degree of tiredness may have resulted in the wrong bowl receiving the colouring. Though witnesses were few and far between…)

In the end for what amounted to less than an hour of fun and good humour in the kitchen, delayed somewhat by the deliberations over flavours, resulted in a huge box of awesome crunchy and super tasty biscuits. Possessing a wonderful snap when you bite into them and having a texture very similar to shortbread they are now a permanent feature on our “bestest recipe list”.