Gingerbread cookies have long ceased to be trivial pastries, now this is a real work of art, which sometimes reveals a real artist in a confectioner. In addition to the fact that such sweet masterpieces should be beautiful, they must also be tasty. To fulfill the last condition, you need to uncover the secret of how to cook appetizing and fragrant gingerbread dough. Below are seven worthy recipes for different types of gingerbread.

Gingerbread House Dough

The gingerbread house is a miniature fairy tale that you can create in your own kitchen. On New Year's holidays, such a culinary and architectural masterpiece will cause more admiration among adults and children than a decorated two-meter tree.

If, in anticipation of the upcoming holidays, the desire to create something like that wakes up, then you need to roll up your sleeves and prepare:

  • 250 g of honey;
  • 250 g of sugar;
  • 150 g butter;
  • 1 egg
  • 25 g of cocoa;
  • 20 ml of rum or brandy;
  • 5 g of baking powder;
  • 625 g of flour;
  • a bouquet of spices for gingerbread to taste.

Step by step dough kneading:

  1. Heat sugar, butter and honey on a stove until all grains and crystals are completely dissolved, the mixture should not boil.
  2. Sift half the general norm of flour with cocoa, spices and baking powder.
  3. In the honey mixture that has cooled down to a warm state, pour the egg and cognac scattered in a homogeneous liquid. Then, in small fractions, introduce the flour mixture.
  4. Insert the flour into the dough until the mass becomes dense, but still elastic. So that all the properties of the test can be fully revealed, he should spend the night or day in the refrigerator.

For the walls and roof of the house, the dough needs to be rolled into a layer of 5 mm thick. If you put crushed caramel in the slot for windows, then after baking you get windows with colored glasses. Only bake gingerbread in this case, you need on greased with vegetable oil parchment.

Cooking raw

The raw method is considered simplified, since in this case it is not necessary to make flour, all the ingredients are simply mixed at room temperature. The dough as a result is quite loose and at the same time viscous.

A simple recipe for such gingerbread cookies includes:

  • 250 g of sugar;
  • 100 ml of water;
  • 50 g butter;
  • 3 g of soda;
  • 1.5 g of vanillin;
  • 390-460 g of flour.

Kneading Algorithm:

  1. Dissolve sugar with vanilla in warm water. When the syrup has cooled to room temperature, add soft butter to it and mix thoroughly.
  2. Combine flour with soda, sift, and then mix in portions in the dough. Immediately after kneading, you can start forming and baking products. The recommended thickness of the dough is 5 - 6 mm.

So that the gingerbread cookies mixed in the raw way, only delight in their taste, it is important to monitor the temperature of the dough. It should not exceed 22 degrees, otherwise the mass will be delayed and clogged with flour. At higher temperatures, you should simply reduce the kneading time.

For painted gingerbread

Gingerbread cookies in the form of various cartoon characters painted with colored sugar glaze are now very popular. With minimal drawing skills, it’s not at all difficult to prepare them at home, you just need to pick up a dough recipe that after baking will have a smooth surface suitable for painting and a friable texture.

All these criteria correspond to the dough prepared according to the following recipe:

  • 100 g of powdered sugar;
  • 1 egg
  • 50 ml of vegetable oil;
  • 50 g of honey;
  • 3 g of salt;
  • 10 g of cocoa;
  • 3.5 g soda;
  • 3,5 - 7 g of dry gingerbread spirits;
  • 220 g flour.

Kneading Technology:

  1. Put powder, egg, vegetable oil and honey in a bowl. Thoroughly mix everything (do not beat, namely mix) with a whisk.
  2. Combine flour with cocoa, soda, salt and spices. Add the resulting mixture in a couple of spoons to the liquid components and knead the dough.
  3. Collect it in a shiny lump, when touched it may feel a slight honey stickiness, and send it to ripen in the refrigerator for a day.

In order for the gingerbread cookies to be ideal for painting, they need to be rolled out of the same thickness and make their surface smooth, not sloping.

To evenly roll out the dough, you can use a special rolling pin or simply roll out the mass between two wooden planks of the desired thickness. A wooden board placed for five minutes on top of baking, just removed from the oven, will help level the surface of the gingerbread cookies.

Choux pastry

With all the variety of recipes, experienced chefs insist that real gingerbread dough is prepared only in a custard way. In this case, the kneading technology includes three main stages: brewing flour with sweet honey-sugar syrup, cooling the custard base and direct kneading.

The list of ingredients required for custard gingerbread dough:

  • 100 ml of liquid honey;
  • 150 g of sugar;
  • 100 ml of water;
  • 3.5 g spice mix for gingerbread;
  • 390 - 420 g flour;
  • 3.5 g soda;
  • 20 g butter;
  • 2 eggs.

How to cook the dough in a custard way:

  1. In a saucepan, combine water, honey and sugar. Bring this mixture to a temperature of 70 - 80 degrees, then add half the recipe amount of flour mixed with spices. Quickly stir the resulting composition so that there are no lumps, and brew. Brewed dough will gather in a lump and will leave a thin flour film at the bottom of the dishes.
  2. Sift the rest of the flour with soda. Eggs spread with a fork in a liquid egg mixture. Soften the oil at room temperature. When the custard base of the dough has cooled to almost room temperature, combine it with the rest of the prepared ingredients and knead the dough.

Products from this type of dough can be baked immediately after kneading, but for gingerbread with complex curvy edges it is better to cool it for 10-12 hours. So it will be easier to work with the mass.

Cooking Technology by Julia Small

Popular food blogger Julia Small offers her own basic gingerbread dough recipe on her channel. To make the pastries more flavorful, she recommends using her favorite spices: cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, anise and ginger, as well as citrus zest.

The proportions of the ingredients for one portion of the dough will be as follows:

  • 100 g of softened butter;
  • 100 g of sugar;
  • 1 egg
  • 50 g of honey;
  • 250 - 300 g of flour;
  • 3.5 g soda;
  • 10 g of ginger;
  • 5 g of cinnamon.

The sequence of actions:

  1. First, prepare a mixture of the dry components of the dough. To do this, sift the flour into a bowl, add soda and spices to it, carefully mix everything with a dry hand whisk.
  2. Next, beat the butter with a mixer with a sugar rate. When the mass brightens and becomes lush, you should beat the egg and mix everything again with a mixer until smooth.
  3. In bulk, mix bulk components in two divided doses. Knead the dough well. Then collect it in a bun, transfer to a bowl, which tighten with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for a couple of hours (ideally overnight). This will make the dough harder and easier to work with.

To get a darker dough, instead of regular sugar, you can take brown or replace part of the flour with cocoa powder.

Roe dough

Kozuli are gingerbread cookies that were prepared in the server regions of Russia (for example, in Arkhangelsk). Instead of spices, northern herbs were added to them, which gave the products a unique aroma and extended their shelf life.

With the spread of spices, the recipe for real roe was lost, but other features of the test remained.

Gingerbread dough is still kneaded on burnt sugar and two types of flour (wheat and rye):

  • 250 g of sugar;
  • 125 ml of boiling water;
  • 100 g butter;
  • 1 egg and 2 yolks;
  • 3.5 g soda;
  • 1.5 g of salt;
  • 300 g of wheat flour;
  • 200 g peeled rye flour;
  • 5 - 7 g or to taste a mixture of spices for gingerbread.

Working process:

  1. Pour sugar into a stewpan with a thick bottom or in a cast-iron frying pan with high walls and melt it to a state of dark caramel (like milk toffee). At this time, you need to keep a kettle with boiling water on hand.
  2. As soon as the sugar is in the right condition, pour the necessary volume of boiling water into it and stir. After the water to the sugar, send soda, spices and butter. The last component is laid out in a whole piece and everything is stirred until smooth.
  3. The resulting liquid base should be a beautiful amber color. Before the next step, it needs to be allowed to cool to room temperature. Scatter the eggs until smooth and mix with the cooled rare compound.
  4. Then it remains to gradually add a mixture of two types of flour and knead a soft dough, which then will also need to spend the night in the refrigerator to mature completely.

Roe dough is perfect both for thin openwork gingerbread cookies and for baking thicker, gingerbread houses can also be made from it. If at hand there is no special mixture of spices for gingerbread, it can be replaced with a mixture for making mulled wine, ground in a coffee grinder.

On burnt sugar

Burnt sugar is used not only for traditional roe, but also in other gingerbread recipes on wheat flour.

Here is one of them:

  • 100 g of sugar;
  • 50 ml of boiling water;
  • 150 g of honey;
  • 150 g butter;
  • 5 g of soda;
  • 10 - 14 g of a mixture of ground spices for gingerbread;
  • 1 egg
  • 350 g of flour.

Cooking gingerbread dough:

  1. In a bowl with a thick bottom, make caramel from sugar. Remove the molten composition from the heat, pour boiling water into it and stir
  2. Then add spices, soda, add honey and return to the fire. With vigorous and continuous stirring, boil the mixture for 2 to 3 minutes, then add the oil in small portions, stirring until smooth.
  3. After that, remove the base from the heat and cool to 60 ° C, stir in the egg, making sure that it does not curl. Then it remains only to mix the flour. The smaller it is, the softer the dough will be.

An obligatory step in the preparation of this test is the ripening in the refrigerator. A plastic bag with this gingerbread composition can be stored on a cool shelf for up to three weeks without loss of taste.

In conclusion, it’s worthwhile to dwell a little on what gives the gingerbread cookies a unique zest, which is called a “bouquet”, “dry perfumes” or simply “a mixture of spices for baking”. Of course, you can buy a finished product, but it’s better to cook it yourself by combining your favorite spices in a coffee grinder.

But it is worth remembering that although the amount of star anise is considered to be “stars”, only grains are used for “spirits”, and it is better to take only the upper part of the buds from cloves.

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