Gingerbread cookies are a favorite treat of a Russian person. For their preparation does not require a lot of various ingredients. And still I want homemade gingerbreads to be delicious. How to bake gingerbread cookies, the same as in the store - airy and soft, fragrant and with icing? Easily! From simple products and improvised tools. It will come out three times more and just as cheaper!
So, prepare homemade gingerbread cookies. The recipe is the same, but as you will see later, it can also be changed:
Ingredients
Flour - 2 cups, eggs - 2 pcs, milk - a quarter cup, sugar - 1.5 cups, soda - half a teaspoon.
You can cook homemade gingerbread on kefir , the recipe will be the same. And you can on the water, without eggs, if only there was margarine. In this case, the ingredients are combined as follows: the same amount of flour and sugar, margarine - 50 grams (a quarter of a 200-gram package), water - a third of a glass, soda. For best taste, add cinnamon (half a teaspoon).
Dough
The ingredients are mixed. To make the gingerbread cookies airy, first crush the eggs with sugar (it is better to beat with a mixer until the mass is doubled). For the same purpose, before adding flour to the rest of the ingredients, sift it. The dough should be thick and elastic. Mash it in a small amount of flour and put it in the bag in the refrigerator, it should lie for 2 hours. Then roll out a layer of 5 mm (when the gingerbread cookies are baked, they will rise one and a half times). We cut out different shapes of gingerbread from it.
* To prepare a dough on water, sugar should be melted with water over a fire until it is completely dissolved. Then combine with flour and cinnamon, pour margarine slightly flooded in a pan. The layer from this test should be rolled out a little thicker.
Bake
It is better to grease a baking sheet with fat, a thin layer. Bake in the oven, preheated to 200 degrees, 10-12 minutes. Do not open the oven lid, otherwise the gingerbread cookies will not work out with air and soft!
Glaze
While baking gingerbread cookies, prepare the “icing”. Some housewives do not like to cook glaze, so they will appreciate the simpler way. Beat eggs (1-2 pcs). We get the rosy gingerbread and immediately grease them with the prepared eggs, sprinkle with sugar on top. Sugar is better to grind to the formation of powdered sugar.
It’s better to make white sweet icing. So your homemade gingerbread cookies will look more appetizing. The recipe for glaze, by the way, is not complicated. Cook in a small saucepan over high heat. Take 0.25 cups of water for 0.5 cups of sugar (just so much glaze is enough for a whole kilogram of gingerbread). Cook, constantly removing the emerging foam, until thickened. The fire should be reduced as soon as the syrup begins to rise to the edges of the pan. Stir constantly, otherwise the sugar will burn. The syrup should be so thick when greasing the gingerbread that it does not drain, but stretches. In the finished syrup, you can add cognac (just a few drops), or the juice of a lemon peel, or mix it with vanilla sugar.
Pour the gingerbread in the prepared syrup. Allow time to harden. Leave the gingerbread cookies in a cool place before serving. Moreover, gingerbread cookies are such a sweetness that does not serve hot. However, keeping them in the refrigerator is also not worth it.
Experimenting with taste!
We talked a little about how to cook homemade gingerbread cookies, the recipe for their preparation allows you to diversify their taste. Coconut, lemon juice can be added to the icing. In the dough itself - vanilla, poppy seeds, cocoa (gingerbread will be chocolate), jam (taste will change), honey instead of sugar, nuts (peanuts, walnuts, nutmeg), lemon juice, berry juice, jam. Fragrant gingerbread is obtained by adding mint or cloves, ginger or cardamom to the dough. Gingerbread cookies, by the way, got such a name precisely because of the spices that are added to the dough and glaze. So do not regret for the gingerbread "seasoning"!
Now you yourself can tell how to make gingerbread, and not simple, but with different tastes!