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.
Preparation
To prepare the glaze, we need only two main ingredients - egg white and powdered sugar. One large egg produces quite a large amount of icing, which is enough for a good kilogram of cookies. Wash the egg thoroughly with soap. We carefully separate the egg white from the yolk. Beat the egg whites with a mixer at low speed, using a whisk or fork. Whipping the whites into a foam is not our goal. It is necessary that the protein only becomes a homogeneous liquid mass.
Now add lemon juice, which will make the icing shine and shimmer a little in the light, and mix. The glaze is ready. Next, if you need icing of different colors, then divide it into different containers and add food coloring. I use Americolor gel dye. The quantity is determined by the intensity of the color you want to achieve.
You can use the icing to paint with dots, lines, or to completely fill the entire surface of the cookie. To prepare the filling mixture, add a few drops of water to the glaze and mix. If the glaze is still thick, then add more water and so on until the required consistency is reached - it should be liquid enough to spread over the surface of the cookies. We do the filling like this: first we draw a line along the perimeter of the future filling with thick glaze, and then we fill the inner space with a thinner glaze. We put our mixture into pastry bags. You can use regular bags if you don't have piping bags or a pastry syringe.
We cut off the edge and start drawing. The main thing is not to be afraid to do this. These cookies will still decorate any tea party and will look very elegant! I have quite a bit of artistic talent, but it turned out well, it seems to me.
Look at the photo, some of the cookies are decorated with dots, and the cloud in the foreground is almost completely filled. The glaze dries in different ways: thick glaze takes 30 minutes, liquid glaze dries for a couple of hours at room temperature before pouring. If a thick layer of icing is placed on the cookies, the time will increase. The glaze will dry for sure in a couple of days!
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-honey cookies with orange zest
We will need:
- honey - 6 tablespoons;
- ground ginger - 1 teaspoon;
- sugar - 6 tablespoons;
- vanillin - half a teaspoon;
- cinnamon - 1 teaspoon;
- flour - 2.5 cups;
- soda - half a spoon (teaspoon);
- butter - 200 grams;
- orange zest - 1 tablespoon.
Place sugar, honey, cinnamon, ginger and vanillin in a saucepan, stir and bring the mixture to a boil.
Remove from heat. Then put flour, butter, soda and zest there. Leave the dough for a while to cool. Now roll out a layer from the finished dough; its thickness should be 0.5 centimeters. Start cutting out shapes from it.
Line a baking tray with baking paper and grease with butter. Place cookies on it and place in the refrigerator for 20 minutes.
Then place the cookies in the oven preheated to 180 degrees. Bake for 10 minutes.
Sprinkle slightly cooled cookies with powdered sugar and cinnamon.
Ginger cookies came to us from overseas. It is there that it is customary to bake special cookies or gingerbreads in the form of different figures. Ginger is a mandatory ingredient in such baking. It is also interesting that such ginger pastries can be served not only with tea, but also to decorate New Year trees with it. You make a puncture in the top, thread a beautiful ribbon and hang it on the tree. The kids will be absolutely delighted)))
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.
Gingerbread
The dough for gingerbread is dense, which allows you to sculpt many different figures from it. For them, prepare 180 grams of flour, 1 teaspoon each of powdered root and cinnamon, 75 grams of powdered sugar and butter, 2 tbsp each. spoons of fresh honey and molasses, and a quarter teaspoon of soda.
Preparation:
If you want to get a dark-colored gingerbread, you need to replace the powdered sugar with dark-colored sugar.
Ginger cookies are not only a sweet and healthy treat, they can serve as Christmas tree decorations. New Year's cookie toys are made just as quickly and easily as regular gingerbread cookies. Bon appetit and bright holidays to you!
Baking with fresh ginger
Recipes for ginger cookies from Yulia Vysotskaya are quite numerous. They are all interesting in their own way. And as a rule, they differ in some components. You can choose the most suitable and optimal option for yourself.
Recipes for ginger cookies from Yulia Vysotskaya are always a celebration of taste, and therefore we offer another dessert option with fresh ginger.
Let's take the following ingredients:
- Flour – 220 g.
- Fresh grated ginger – 2 tbsp. l.
- One egg.
- Soda.
- Soft butter – 160 g.
- Salt – ½ tsp.
- Sugar – 100 g.
- Molasses – 60 g.
- Ground cinnamon – ¾ tsp.
- Chopped cloves – ½ tsp.
- A pinch of ground nutmeg.
