Gingerbread Men

The other week I had a night off work (a Christmas miracle in itself!). I went to Emma's and we decided to get properly Christmassy by making some Gingerbread men (and women and cows...what can I say, we found a lot of cool cookie cutters.)

We used the recipe which I use every year, which is a slightly adapted version of the Hummingbird Bakery recipe.

Ingredients
400g plain flour
180g salted butter
100g dark brown suagr
25g golden caster sugar
1 egg
125g back treacle
3/4 teaspoon bicarb of soda
3 teaspoons ground ginger
2 teaspoons round cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
3/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
For the icing:
1 egg white
Juice of 1 lemon
310g of icing sugar (and no, it doesn't really work if you try and blend up caster sugar and turn it into icing sugar, we learnt that the hard way)
Food colouring of your choice

So start by measuring all your dry ingredients (flour, bicarb, spices) into a bowl and set aside.

Then in your mixer blend together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Add the egg and treacle and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients and mix well.

Cling film your dough and put in the fridge for as long as possible, ideally over night. We put ours in the freezer for half an hour to speed up the process. Try and find something deep and meaningful to do whilst you wait... like cuddling your friend's cat.

This is Alfie and I love him.

As you can tell, the feeling is obviously mutual.

Anyway, back to the gingerbread men. Get the dough out of the fridge. If it has been in there overnight you might need to leave it out for a few minutes so that you can roll it out.

Pre-heat you oven to 180 and start rollin. Cut out whatever shapes you want, Christmassy or not, and stick them in the oven for 10-15 mins.

^The well known symbols of Christmas, the cow and the tortoise!

Whilst the biscuits are cooling, make you icing. Beat the egg white with the lemon juice. Gradually add the icing sugar until it forms stiff peaks.  Separate into bowls and make whatever colour combos you want.

And get decorating (WARNING, unless your a super artsy and creative person, which Emma and I are not, this will be fun for about 5 mins after which you will want to kill yourself and everyone around you)

Whilst our decorating skills may not be the best, we definitely had fun ad got in the Christmas spirit.   This would also be a really fun thing to do with little ones.

Hope everyone's having a good run up to Christmas!