I don’t have a sweet tooth. I have sweet teeth. All of them are sweet. The I Quit Sugar cult disturbs me. Sarah Wilson is my enemy. But I don’t eat a lot of chocolate, and I’ll only eat ice cream if it’s really hot.
For me, it’s all about the cookie. I am the original Cookie Monster. Sweet, crunchy, perfect with a cup of tea. Very portable, which is vital. I always have some cookies in my handbag. For sugar emergencies (Yes, that’s a thing. I’m convinced it’ll come in handy one day when I’m trapped in my car during a snow storm or something. I’ll emerge after two weeks looking pale and frazzled, but I will have survived because I rationed out the half dozen cookies in my handbag. That’s SMART. Hello book deal!!)
After making my Gingerbread house, I had some dough left over. That stuff wasn’t going to waste. So, naturally, I made some decorations for my Christmas tree.
I’ll show you how:
You can use the same recipe as the Gingerbread House, but that recipe is quite a firm dough and makes quite crunchy cookies. If you’re looking for something a bit more tender, you can try this recipe:
Gingerbread cookies
Preheat oven to 180 degrees celsius
125g butter (room temperature)
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Golden Syrup
1 egg yolk (don’t throw out the egg white because you’ll need it for the royal icing)
3 cups plain flour
1 Tablespoon Ginger
1/2 teaspoon Cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon Nutmeg
1 teaspoon Bicarb Soda
- Cream the butter and sugar.
- Add the egg yolk and Golden Syrup and mix.
- Add all the dry ingredients and knead. If the mix is too soft, add some more flour.
- Refrigerate the dough for about half an hour.
- Roll out the dough to a thickness of about 4mm.
- Cut out your shapes and place on a baking sheet covered in baking paper.
If you’re planning on hanging them on your tree, you’ll need to add some holes. I used some sort of metal something or other I found in the shit drawer. You know the shit drawer. Everyone has one.
Poor snowmen copped it right between the eyes….
Bake for 10 – 14 minutes depending on how crispy you like your cookies.
Let your cookies cool down before you decorate
Icing
I’ve used fondant icing to decorate. You can also use royal icing if you have a really steady hand (I’ll do a royal icing post soon). But you will need some royal icing to stick the fondant to the cookies. If you made the gingerbread house you should have some left over. If not here’s your recipe:
Royal Icing
1 egg white (you’ll have one left over from the gingerbread recipe)
1 cup of pure icing sugar
Whisk the egg white until it forms soft peaks.
Slowly add icing sugar and keep beating until firm.
You can buy the fondant icing from the cake aisle in the supermarket. All it needs is to be rolled out. I recommend rolling it quite thin because it can be a bit sickly if it’s too thick. BUT – it shows a lot more lumps and bumps when it’s thin. If you want a really smooth finish, roll it about 4mm thick.
Sift some icing sugar onto your rolling surface to stop it from sticking. You might want to cover your hands with some icing sugar as well.
Use the same cookie cutter you used for the cookie to cut out the shape. The cookie will have spread a bit so the fondant icing won’t reach all the way to the edges.
Use a very thin smear of royal icing to stick the fondant to the cookie.
I used a tiny set of stamp letters to press words like JOY, HOPE and PEACE into the fondant. Do it while the fondant is still very fresh and soft. If you wait too long, the fondant will start to dry a bit and the letters will crack the surface.
If you’d like to colour your fondant, you can use any food dye. Just be warned that if you use liquid food colouring, it will make your fondant a bit wet and sticky. Just dust it with some icing sugar to dry it up a bit.
Add just a few drops at a time. Then knead and knead and knead to spread it through. I fold it very carefully before I start kneading so the colouring is on the inside to start with, but no matter how you do it, you will get food dye all over your hands. Deal with it.
Keep going until the fondant is one even colour.
I had a candy cane shaped cookie cutter and wanted to do a candy cane stripe. So I came up with this.
Use whatever two colours you’d like and roll some sausages of fondant like this.
Then roll it all out carefully and it should end up looking like this.
If you’ve got holes in your cookies, poke through the fondant (come from the back of the cookie so you don’t go blindly poking around in your fresh fondant) with a toothpick or skewer. Let the fondant dry a bit before you thread any string through because it will slice straight through fresh fondant.
I also bought some of those clear Christmas baubles from the $2 shop and popped some cookies in them to hang on the tree as well. Probably a good idea in my household because a fresh cookie in plain sight won’t last long. The bauble offers some sort of protection…. Some…
Seriously though… the smell of gingerbread baking….. ARGH!!
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This is part of a Christmas Party Linkup I’m hosting with some of my favourite bloggers: Our Urban Box, Life at Number Five, Calm to Conniption, From The Left Field, Boiled Eggs and Soldiers, You Had Us At Hello and Stephs Joy.
Link up your favourite Christmas post from this year and then pop around and say hello to some of the other lovely linkers. The party has just begun and links will close on Boxing Day so plenty of time to visit some of your favourite bloggers and wish them a Merry Christmas!
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3 comments
Just a couple please
You are the Gingerbread Queen! These look so professional and I’m totally swooning overt those candy canes. I make a similar gingerbread recipe in the Thermomix (although mine look nothing like yours!) and I love the texture of the gingerbread, with a touch of crunch and some soft crumblyness to finish it off. I think you have the best idea ever to use fondant – perfect results ever time. Will we see you on Australia’s next Great Bake Off?
Thank you!
Oh yeah, fondant is the bomb. I prefer the flavour of royal icing but you need to have nerves of steel to get it looking neat. Fondant feels like cheating!
I would never survive one of those cooking shows. I have a very limited repertoire. Cookies and cupcakes. That’s about it! All those fancy pastries and pies… oh my goodness they’re amazing.