Gingerbread cookies. Tangy and full of flavor, these are classic cookies for when the winter gets cold. They are great to decorate (royal icing, candies, etc.) or great to leave plan and dip in hot chocolate (if you haven’t tried that yet, you don’t know what you’re missing).
The Story
It doesn’t quite feel like the holidays until you have gingerbread cookies. The spices that are in the cookies, the deep warm brown of the dough, the endless ways to decorate them. It’s all good 🙂
For my holiday, I wanted to do a classic gingerbread (my classic gingerbread has a tad more ginger in it than others, since I loveeeee ginger). I also wanted to steer away from the always popular gingerbread house (which is also more frustrating to make than everyone always remembers), and instead I made Santa’s sleigh. The sleigh was a custom design that I drew on paper and then cut out using a knife. I also didn’t have reindeer cookie cutters, so I went along and just used dinosaurs.
It made a nice center piece on the dessert table, and was a great place to display the cake balls that I made!
Ingredients
6 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cups butter (softened)
2 cups dark brown sugar (lightly packed)
1 cup molasses
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 batch of Royal Icing
The Detailed Guide
Make the Dough
In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, ginger, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Mix this with a whisk to thoroughly combine and get those spices evenly distributed throughout the flour.
Then, in a mixing bowl, beat the butter and the brown sugar until fluffy.
I know that most recipes that involve brown sugar, have you tightly packing the brown sugar when you are measuring. I find this annoying, because tightly packed brown sugar is just going to cause us to have clumps of it in our mixing. Instead, by lightly packing the brown sugar, we are keeping air in our sugar, and this will help us cream it with the butter. Since there is more air in the cups (lightly packed versus tightly packed), you’ll see I’ve used “more” sugar than other recipes.
Pour in molasses and mix until evenly combined. Add in the eggs one at a time and then the vanilla extract. Finally, add in the flour mixture in 3 or 4 batches, scaping down the edges of the bowl after each addition. You should have a nice and fragrant dough that is a not too sticky but not too dry. Before refrigerating, cut the dough into 4 pieces. This will speed up the cooling process and let us not have to worry about rolling out that large mass of dough all at once. Wrap the pieces in parchment paper and put in the fridge until cool (about an hour).
Add flour and all of the spices (not just the allspice) in a bowl.
Thoroughly mix.
Look at that beautiful color! You don’t want to coat it in flour and ruin that.
Cut the Cookies!
Once cooled, take one of the pieces of dough out of the fridge and roll between 2 pieces of parchment paper.
The last thing you want to do with cookie dough, is roll it on a floured surface so the outside of our cookies can get unnecessarily dry and then burn in the oven!
Once about 1/4 of an inch thick, you are good as gold to use your cookie cutters to make the shapes you want. This is actually a fairly nice dough to work with, and so if you don’t have the cookie cutter than you want, this is a great dough to use your own designs on. I drew my outline of Santa’s sleigh on a piece of thick paper, and then used a knife to cut around it for my cookies. You don’t get much rise or expansion of the dough, so it’s great for fun, new, and custom shapes!
Pop these in the oven (350°) for 10-15 minutes. Gingerbread cookies in general are a little tricky to make because overcooking/burning the edges is soooooo easy to do. I recommend checking them about 7-8 minutes in, and then about every 2 minutes or so until you are happy with them. Thicker cookies will take more time. More chewy cookies will take less. It’s all about finding your happy place.
Set to cool COMPLETELY on a wired rack before icing these with your Royal Icing. A warm cookie will just cause the icing to melt all over them and you’ll get sad cookies. Decorate with Royal Icing, candies, etc. The ideas are endless, so make all your cookies different!
I couldn’t find “side view of Santa’s sleigh” in a cookie cutter. So I made my own out of paper.
Try to make all cookies the same thickness.
Royal icing also holds the cookies together to form 3-D shapes.
On T-Rex, on Stegosaurus! Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!
Shut up and just GIVE ME THE RECIPE!!
Ingredients
6 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon allspice
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cups butter (softened)
2 cups dark brown sugar (lightly packed)
1 cup molasses
2 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 batch of Royal Icing
Make It
Make the Dough
In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, ginger, allspice, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon until evenly distributed.
Then, in a mixing bowl, beat the butter and the brown sugar until fluffy. Pour in the molasses and mix. Add in the eggs one at a time and then the vanilla extract. Finally, add in the flour mixture in 3 or 4 batches, scaping down the edges of the bowl after each addition. Before refrigerating, cut the dough into 4 pieces to speed up the cooling process. Wrap the pieces in parchment paper and put in the fridge until cool (about an hour).
Cut the Cookies!
Once cooled, take one of the pieces of dough out of the fridge and roll between 2 pieces of parchment paper. Once about 1/4 of an inch thick, use your cookie cutters.
Pop these in the oven (350°) for 10-15 minutes. Thicker cookies will take more time. More chewy cookies will take less. It’s all about finding your happy place.
Set to cool COMPLETELY on a wired rack before icing these with your Royal Icing. Decorate with icing, candies, etc. The ideas are endless, so make all your cookies different!