Adventures in gingerbread – part one

Welcome to another mini-series on the blog. My previous track record with this kind of thing isn’t great – I didn’t ever finish ‘cooking from my calendar’ and I think I might have lost the actual calendar now, whoops.

Hopefully I can cope with a two-part series though. At the time of writing, it might be a three-part series, I haven’t decided yet.

And if you hadn’t guessed, it’s all about gingerbread! Woo woo woo woo woo!

Back in October, one of my friends came to visit and we had a Christmas night in watching movies and eating Christmas food. We both love Christmas, so a little Christmas night in is ideal. Plus, I was feeling a bit gloomy so it was nice to do something like that and it cheered me up.

When doing a spot of shopping, I found these biscuits and I thought decorating them would be a fun thing to do; Christmas themed, low effort because everything you need is in the box, and you get to eat them at the end.

Here are our finished biscuits – one of them was already broken in the box, so we did what we could with that one. Also the sprinkles are mine, they didn’t come in the packet:

Here is my favourite biscuit that I decorated, even though the icing spread a bit:

I enjoyed this whole exercise so much that I decided to make and decorate my own biscuits. So I used the gingerbread dough recipe in my Great British Bake Off Showstoppers book and made some stars.

Now in the book it says: “This easy dough for crisp, well-spiced, dark gingerbread biscuits is made by the melting method – the butter, golden syrup and sugar are gently melted together in a saucepan.” It’s super easy.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION: While waiting for the butter/sugar/golden syrup to melt, I had a hot chocolate on standby and a Christmas playlist on the go. It was suitably festive and I have found a new favourite festive song – it’s here if you would like to listen to it.

What’s your favourite Christmas song? I mainly like them all but I do like Last Christmas by Wham!, and I feel that My Only Wish (This Year) by Britney Spears is vastly underestimated as a Christmas bop.

Anyway. When I put all the dry ingredients in the bowl I wanted to take an arty picture of it, but it looked rubbish so I didn’t.

When I got my dough out of the fridge it was really crumbly. I soon learned, thanks to Professor Google, that it was because I hadn’t kneaded it enough but that was resolved fairly easily. And a note for next time: don’t be scared to knead away.

Now the recipe said to cook the biscuits for between 8-10 minutes, but because I had a variety of sizes I had to play around with the timing a bit. As expected the first batch was very crisp, but things got better from that point onwards.

There was only one casualty! It fell off my spatula on the way on to the cooling rack. Not really a tragedy for me though because as I ate it…

Then came the fun bit – the decorating. It’s just so therapeutic and relaxing! For the more intricate biscuits I used the leftover icing tube that I had from the pack I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, and for the ones that aren’t so delicate I just made my own icing.

Here are a load of pictures of my decorated gingerbread, accompanied by a festive garland:

I’m no expert at decorating, but I’m pretty pleased with how these turned out! I did a mixture of designs and tried to use up as many of those tiny silver ball things as I could because I have so many and no idea what else to use them for.

Oh yeah, and I thought they tasted pretty good too 🙂 And I had a request from someone to make some more, which is always a good sign. They did go a bit soft overnight so they weren’t super crispy, but I liked them.

See you next time for Adventures in Gingerbread – part two… because there is a part two planned, so if you don’t see it, then just assume it’s all gone wrong.