Gingerbread Men

Gingerbread biscuits signal the coming of Christmas in my house. My mum even makes gingerbread decorations for the tree (which last about two days). As I have about a week left until I have to hand in my dissertation, anything snack related is a godsend so I thought I’d make something Christmassy to get me through.

The only cookie cutter I could find without having to go into town was this absolutely mahoosive one so these gingerbread men are MEN. Also yes, I am aware that they look like they’ve been decorated by a five year old. That is just how gingerbread men are supposed to be, okay?

Ingredients

350g plain flour

1tsp bicarbonate soda

2tsp ground ginger

1tsp ground cinnamon

125g butter

175g dark brown soft sugar

1 egg

4tbsp golden syrup

Firstly, this is all done very easily if you have a food processor. Sadly, I am a poor student so have to do these things by hand. It still works; it just takes a little longer.

Combine the flour, bicarbonate soda, ginger and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl.

Tip in the butter and combine everything together using your fingertips until the mixture becomes fine crumbs.

Stir in the sugar.

Beat the egg and golden syrup together and then add it to the mixture. Combine everything together, sticking your hands right in there if you need to.

Wrap the ball of dough in some Clingfilm and chill in the fridge for at least half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Line a couple baking trays with baking parchment.

Roll the dough out on a lightly floured work surface until around half a cm thick. Use the cookie cutters to make the men. If like mine your cutter doesn’t include legs, use a sharp knife to create a slit. Place them on the baking tray, leaving room for them to grow.

Bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes, watching carefully to make sure they don’t catch. Leave them on the tray to cool for around 10 minutes before decorating.

To decorate mine I combined some icing sugar with a little water, and then went a bit mad with any random decorations I had lying around. You can make them look a bit more professional and neat if you want but in my opinion that’s just a bit boring…

NOTE: I had an absolute spaz this morning because when I went to write up this blog post it wouldn’t let me upload any photos. It said basically that you only get 1GB free storage space with Picasa, and wanted me to spend money every month for more space. Personally I think that is absolute bollocks. So after going through a mental list of which family members I could guilt trip into buying me Google space for Christmas, I thought I’d just well, Google the issue. I’m glad I did because some helpful person pointed out that for some reason Google doesn’t count photos which are under 800 pixels as part of your storage.

This means that although it’s a bit of a faff, it’s still happy days because I can carry on blogging for free! Just open the photo in paint and click ‘resize’, and there’s a pixel option where you can set it to under 800. I hope this helps for anyone having the same issue, because it is a pain in the arrssse.