There are many recipes for making Christmas cookies with ginger. But it is not necessary to observe strict proportions of ingredients. If you are a creative person, then create real masterpieces of cooking yourself and prepare gingerbread cookies to your taste.
Imagine, play and create with your children in the kitchen. And you will definitely get a festive mood, a warming aroma of spices in the apartment and a delicate taste created by your hands, fabulous cookies.
I will dwell in detail on the classic version of the British, who bake traditional gingerbread cookies for Christmas. First you need to turn on the oven and heat it to 180 degrees. During this time, grind with a fork 100 grams of butter, add 1 egg, ¾ cup sugar and mix the mixture until it is completely dissolved. It should turn out white and airy mass.
Then take 2 cups of wheat flour, 2 tsp each. ground ginger and baking powder, 1 tsp each nutmeg and cinnamon, ½ tsp. cardamom and a pack of vanilla sugar, thoroughly beat everything until smooth. Then gradually pour the flour with spices into the butter-egg mixture to make a stretching dough.
The soft dough is rolled out on a table and cookies are squeezed out with cookie cutters. Carefully transfer it to a baking sheet covered with baking paper, leaving a distance between the figures so that they do not stick together when baking. Ginger cookies are baked for 15 minutes, at a temperature of 180 degrees. It is important not to overdry it, to make sure that the cookies darken slightly below, and on top it is covered with a golden color.
When decorating, use chocolate or white icing, food colors, jam.
In the dough for baking, you can add honey instead of sugar, cloves ground in a coffee grinder, getting different shades of taste and aroma.
Small culinary tricks that are useful in order to make gingerbread cookies quite effective and tasty:
1. All products must be removed from the refrigerator in advance and held on the table at room temperature for at least an hour.
2. It is better to use homemade eggs in baking.
3. Carefully select a bouquet of spices so that their aroma literally captivates.
4. Decorating cookies is better in the form of heat, so its shape and appearance are better preserved
5. To make the cookies lush, be sure to add soda, slaked with vinegar or baking powder.
Children are happy to decorate gingerbread cookies. While it is warm, it is convenient to make a hole in it into which the thread is inserted. Such a beautiful culinary product can be hung on a Christmas tree, used in the form of prizes for children's parties and birthdays. Interesting Easter souvenirs can be baked and put on the table as a treat for tea.
In addition to cookies, you can cook a gentle and long-stale ginger cake with yogurt. It is very refreshing, it always turns out to be soft and airy, it cooks easily and quickly. Children will especially like it.
To prepare it, you need to take a glass of light yogurt (you can replace it with kefir or milk with lemon, but the taste will not be the same), half a pack of melted butter, add 2 beaten eggs, ¾ cup powdered sugar, 2 tsp. fresh grated ginger, mix everything. Sift 1.5 cups of flour, add soda or baking powder to it and pour into the mixture. You should get a gentle semi-liquid dough.
At the bottom of the baking dish, nicely place the apple or pear slices, carefully lay the dough and decorate with the remaining slices on top. Bake the cake for 50 minutes at a temperature of 175 degrees. Cool it in the form and only after that turn on the dish.
Ginger in cooking has been used since ancient times in fresh and ground dry form. Slices of fresh ginger root can be prepared in syrup, and an excellent and healthy treat is obtained. To do this, peel it and to destroy the bitterness, it is soaked for a long time in cold water. After that, they are kept in thick syrup or melted chocolate.