TOP-4 recipes with photos of making monastery gingerbread at home. Cooking tips and secrets. Video recipes.
Gingerbread is a flour confection that is baked from a special gingerbread dough. Most often it is made with honey or sugar with spices, and various flavors are added for taste. Historically, the gingerbread is a festive symbol, because cheap and everyday products were used for it. Today, gingerbread has become not only an ordinary confectionery product. They are used as gifts, made for name days, wedding ceremonies, festive meals, decorating New Year trees, and distributing them to beggars. Some gingerbread cookies were baked in the form of letters of the alphabet with which children learned to read. Gingerbread was presented on Forgiveness Sunday and before the beginning of Lent. Each country has its own custom and recipe for gingerbread, from which there are a lot of its varieties in cooking. These are honey Lebkuchen and gingerbread, Nuremberg and Frankfurt gingerbread, Polish Torun and Czech Pardubice, Tula and Siberian gingerbread … This review presents the TOP-4 of the best recipes for making monastery gingerbread.
Culinary tips and secrets
- The type of gingerbread is most often slightly convex in shape. They can be of different shapes: rectangular, round, oval, curly in the form of bunnies, stars, cockerels, hearts, houses, little men, Christmas trees, letters.
- The size of the gingerbread can be large or small: 5x10cm, 10x18cm and 12x22cm.
- An inscription or drawing is usually made on the top of the product, but most often a layer of confectionery icing is applied on top. Also, gingerbread cookies are decorated with icing, marshmallows, marzipan, chocolate or lemon icing.
- Various additives can be included in the gingerbread dough: nuts, candied fruits, raisins, fruit or berry jam. Also today you can often find black pepper, Italian dill, citrus fruits (orange peel and lemon), essential mint oil, aromatic essences, coriander, mint, vanilla, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, anise, star anise, cumin, nutmeg, cloves.
- To give the products an appetizing yellow color, add burnt sugar or saffron to the gingerbread dough, pink - dried raspberries or cranberries.
- A delicate almond aroma will add ground dried bird cherry berries to the gingerbread.
Lenten monastery gingerbread
Lenten monastery gingerbread will delight during Lent, when strict canons of abstinence from animal food must be observed. Their main difference from classic products is the absence of milk, eggs, butter and other animal products in the dough.
- Caloric content per 100 g - 329 kcal.
- Servings - 30
- Cooking time - 1 hour
Ingredients:
- Rye flour - 1.5 cm
- Baking powder - 1.5 tsp
- Honey (liquid) - 1 tbsp.
- Wheat flour - 1, 5 tbsp.
- Ground cloves - 1 tsp
- Vegetable oil - 50 ml
- Ground cinnamon - 1 tsp
- Orange - 1 pc.
- Nutmeg - 1 tsp
- Allspice - 1 tsp
- Sugar - 2 tablespoons
Cooking lean monastery gingerbread:
- Heat the honey, but do not bring it to a boil. Pour in vegetable oil and stir until smooth.
- Wash the orange, grate the zest on a fine grater and add it to the warm honey mass.
- Mix flour with baking powder, spices, sugar and add to food.
- Knead the dough until light, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- Roll the cooled mass into a layer 5 mm thick, cut out the figures and put on a baking sheet.
- Bake lean monastery gingerbread in the oven at 200 ° C for 15 minutes.
Sweet monastery gingerbread
Butter monastery gingerbread is a standard option for making baked goods with a wonderful aroma and pleasant spicy taste. They are ideal for family teas and special occasions.
Ingredients:
- Milk - 100 ml
- Eggs - 1 pc.
- Sugar - 3 tablespoons
- Baking powder - 1.5 tsp
- Butter - 50 ml
- Honey - 3 tablespoons
- Wheat flour - 400 g
- Vanilla sugar - 10 g
- Ground cinnamon - 1 tsp
- Ground ginger - 0.5 tsp
- Grated lemon zest - 1 tablespoon
Cooking monastic gingerbread:
- Melt the butter with honey and sugar over the fire, not boiling, and stir until smooth.
- Pour in the egg and beat the food with a mixer.
- Add boiled milk with grated lemon zest to the creamy mass and stir.
- Sift flour with baking powder, cinnamon, ginger through a fine sieve and add to the liquid mass.
- Knead the dough with your hands, shape it into a "ball" and send it to the refrigerator for half an hour.
- Roll out the dough into a thin layer, cut out the figures and transfer to a baking sheet covered with parchment.
- Send the products to a heated oven up to 180 ° C for 25 minutes.
Spicy monastery gingerbread
Fragrant and spicy monastery gingerbread is perfect for Christmas and New Years. The aroma of pastries will hover in the house and create a festive mood.
Ingredients:
- Rye flour - 1 tbsp.
- Wheat flour - 1 tbsp.
- Honey - 0, 3 tbsp.
- Sugar - 2 tablespoons
- Vodka - 0.5 tbsp.
- Ground dried orange peel - 1 tsp.
- Ground allspice - 0.5 tsp
- Ground cloves - 0.5 tsp
- Soda - 0.5 tsp
- Nutmeg - 0.5 tsp
- Ground ginger - 0.5 tsp
Cooking spicy monastery gingerbread:
- Heat the honey to a liquid consistency and add spices (allspice, cloves, nutmeg, ginger) and orange zest to it.
- Pour vodka into the resulting mixture, add sugar and stir.
- Pour flour and baking soda, sifted through a sieve, knead the elastic dough and leave to stand for 20 minutes, so that it lightens slightly. Then wrap the dough in plastic and refrigerate for half an hour.
- Roll out the dough in a thick layer, cut into various figures and send to bake in a preheated oven up to 200 ° C for 10 minutes.
Monastic gingerbread with nuts and condensed milk
Gingerbread cookies with boiled condensed milk and walnuts with choux pastry are an amazing dessert with a pleasant texture and rich taste. And thanks to the abundance of spices, ready-made baked goods have a rich and deep aroma.
Ingredients:
- Wheat flour - 450 g
- Water - 220 ml
- Sugar - 200 g
- Honey - 150 g
- Vegetable oil - 70 ml
- Cocoa powder - 1 tsp
- Baking soda - 1 tsp
- Ground cinnamon - 1 tsp
- Ground dry ginger - 1 tsp
- Cardamom - 0.5 tsp
- Nutmeg - 0.25 tsp
- Ground cloves - 0.25 tsp
- Table salt - 1 pinch
- Boiled condensed milk - 380 g
- Walnut - 100 g
Cooking monastery gingerbread with nuts and condensed milk:
- Pour sugar (100 g) into a saucepan, place on the stove and melt over medium heat to form caramel.
- As soon as the caramel darkens, pour boiling water in portions and wait until the burnt sugar dissolves. This will take approximately 10 seconds.
- Then add the remaining sugar to a saucepan and stir to dissolve completely.
- Add cocoa and all the spices (cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves).
- Stir the contents of the dishes, pour in the vegetable oil and stir it into the liquid mixture.
- Add honey and stir until dissolved.
- Add baking soda, remove from heat and stir. The baking soda will react and foam a lot.
- Add sifted flour mixed with salt to the mass and knead the choux pastry.
- Send the dough to mature in the refrigerator for 10 hours.
- Roll out the cooled, dense and elastic dough into a layer 1 cm thick and apply boiled condensed milk mixed with nuts in an even layer.
- Cover the filling with another layer of dough, but thinner (0.5 cm), and brush it with egg yolk if desired.
- Send the products to bake in a heated oven up to 180 ° C for 30 minutes.
- Cut hot ready-made monastery gingerbread with nuts and condensed milk into portions and leave to cool.
