Christmas is around the corner and it’s a great opportunity to not only meet the whole family again but also to create a new Christmas tradition – baking some gingerbread cookies with your children.
Give your little ones the freedom to explore and try things. Reward their effort, even if it means you’ll have to clean up some flour from the floor or that an egg or two end up broken. Pick the cookie shapes you want, help your children make the batter and watch together as your cookies slowly bake in the oven. Can you even remember the last time you’ve done something like this? It’s a beautiful and calming experiences that also allows you time to chat with your children while you wait. Talk about all of the questions, answers, and ideas that you don’t normally have time for during a regular weekday. Who knows? Maybe you’ll grow to love it and bake some cookies together for Easter, too.
Ingredients
- 170g of spelt flour
- 170g of spelt wholegrain or rye flour
- 1/2 pack of gingerbread spice
- 1 tbsp of cinnamon
- 1 tsp of baking soda
- 3 eggs
- 100g of honey
- 80g of powdered cane sugar
- 70g of butter
- 2 tbsp of Dutch processed cocoa
Instructions
Melt the butter and honey together on a mild flame and allow the mixture to cool. Whisk the eggs and sugar together and slowly add the rest of your ingredients, mixing it into a dough. Put the dough into a plastic bag and let it rest until the next day.
The dough is pretty sticky, so you can the plastic bag inside of a bowl so you can easily cover the top. On the next day, take the dough out. Heat up your oven to 160°C. When rolling out the dough, make sure to use a lot of flour, else it will stick to your rolling pin.
Roll out the dough until it’s about 4-5mm thick, then cut out the shapes you want your cookies to have. Put the cookies on a tin lined with baking paper and put them into the oven. Bake your cookies on the middle grill for about 10 minutes. Your cookies will be soft by then. If you want them to be a bit more crispy, allow them to stay in the oven for about 2-3 minutes longer. Once you take them out, you can decorate them with the traditional egg-white icing or with chocolate but they’ll taste just as good without icing.
Tip: Making your own powdered cane sugar
You can make powdered cane sugar easily from traditional cane sugar by crushing it in a poppy grinder or, even easier, in an electrical coffee grinder. If you throw in a vanilla pod into the grinder, you’ll also give your sugar an intense vanilla aroma. Just don’t forget to sieve the finished sugar, in case there are some larger pieces of the vanilla pod left.
