How to cook gingerbread for New Year and Christmas? TOP 4 home step-by-step recipes with photos. Features of cooking. Video recipes.
Gingerbread - in many European countries, they are a symbol of the New Year and Christmas. Although today in the countries of the former CIS they have also adopted the tradition of preparing such delicious treats for the New Year holidays. Fresh homemade baked goods are prepared with your own hands, giving you comfort, aroma and New Year's mood. There are a lot of recipes for making gingerbread: with the addition of honey, bananas, chocolate, raisins, etc. Choose any recipe and please your family with your delicious sweet creation. Experiment, combine flavors and products, bring your ideas to life and create new cooking methods based on the recipes below.
Gingerbread for Christmas - cooking features
- For classic gingerbread, the dough is prepared in advance so that it ripens for another 1-2 days.
- Do not use margarine, vegetable oil or spreads for baking, take only natural dairy products: butter, sour cream, cream.
- Lower flours will make your baked goods better.
- Any honey is suitable for the recipe, as long as it is fragrant. If you want your baked goods to have a darker color, use dark types of honey: buckwheat, heather, forest, etc.
- Add ginger to the dough only in dry ground form.
- Use chocolate, cocoa powder, cardamom, ground cinnamon, pepper, and other aromatic spices as flavoring agents.
- A good result for the gingerbread dough is given by powdered dried berries and finely grated nuts.
- The added vodka, rum and cognac will loosen the dough well. 3-4 tbsp is enough.
- Knead the dough very thoroughly and continuously for 20 to 40 minutes.
- The finished gingerbread is crispy, if soft, return to the oven to bake.
- Gingerbread cookies, unlike cookies, do not immediately acquire density after baking, which makes it difficult to understand whether they are ready or not. You can determine the readiness of the baked goods by examining the edges. If the gingerbread cookies are golden brown, remove the baking sheet and leave for 10 minutes for the pastry to acquire the desired crunch.
- If the gingerbread loses its shape during baking, fix it by trimming it as after baking.
- Decorate chilled gingerbread only. Otherwise, the glaze will spread and melt.
- High-quality gluing glaze for decoration will come out only from egg whites, but not on water. Also gingerbread cookies are glazed with honey syrup with the addition of lemon.
Christmas gingerbread
New Year's and Christmas homemade delicious and fragrant gingerbread cookies are perfect for a gift if they are beautifully packaged in a themed box! They can also be used to make edible toys for the New Year tree.
- Caloric content per 100 g - 322 kcal.
- Servings Per Container - 15
- Cooking time - 1 hour 30 minutes
Ingredients:
- Flour - 400 g
- Egg white - 2 pcs.
- Eggs - 1 pc.
- Lemon juice - 1 tsp
- Sugar - 100 g for dough, 250 g for protein glaze
- Butter - 110 g
- Baking soda - 1 tsp
- Starch - 0.5 tsp
- Honey - 140 g
- Ground cinnamon - 1 tsp
- Ground ginger - 1 tsp
- Ground cardamom - 0.5 tsp
- Ground cloves - 0.5 tsp
- Ground nutmeg - 0.5 tsp
Cooking Christmas Gingerbread:
- Put honey, sugar, spices (ground nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, ginger) in a saucepan and put on medium heat.
- Bring the mixture to a boil and add the baking soda. Mix thoroughly and wait for the reaction to go and the mass begins to foam. After this moment, continue stirring the mass for 1 minute to dissolve the soda.
- Then add the butter, stir, remove the saucepan from the heat and leave to cool.
- Pour the eggs into the slightly cooled mixture, stir until smooth and add the sifted flour.
- Knead the gingerbread dough for Christmas gingerbread and refrigerate it, where it can sit for 2 hours to one month.
- After a certain time, roll out the dough on parchment into a layer 5 mm thick and cut out Christmas blanks in the form of mittens, Santa Claus's boot, a man, Christmas trees, stars … If you plan to hang gingerbread cookies on a Christmas tree, make small holes in them using a cocktail tube.
- Send the gingerbread blanks to bake in a preheated oven to 180 ° C for 8 minutes.
- Cool the finished gingerbread cookies and cover with protein glaze. To do this, combine one protein with sifted powdered sugar and starch. Beat the food with a mixer first at low speed for about 2 minutes. Then add lemon juice and continue whisking for 5 minutes, increasing the speed. The finished glaze will be thick, shiny and without sugar grains.
- Using a piping bag with a nozzle, paint the gingerbread cookies with the prepared icing along the contour and leave to dry.
- To fill, color the frosting in the desired color and cover the entire area of the gingerbread.
- Leave the gingerbread cookies to dry the frosting.
Gingerbread with cognac and cocoa
A traditional Christmas delicacy is fragrant and incredibly tasty gingerbread made in the form of figurines and covered with sugar glaze. It is these cookies with ginger that create a unique fabulous atmosphere of Christmas and New Year, a festive mood, a feeling of warmth and home comfort. The added cognac in this recipe will evaporate all of the baked goods, so don't worry about the presence of alcohol in the dough.
Ingredients:
- Flour - 4 tbsp.
- Eggs - 2 pcs.
- Honey - 2/3 tbsp.
- Sugar - 1 tbsp. for dough, 200 g for icing sugar
- Butter - 150 g
- Soda - 1 tsp
- Fresh ginger, finely grated - 2 tablespoons
- Vanilla sugar - 1 tsp
- Orange zest - from 1 orange
- Ground cinnamon - 1 tsp
- Cocoa powder - 1 tsp
- Cognac - 3 tablespoons
- Ground cardamom - 0.25 tsp
- Ground anise - 0.25 tsp
- Ground cloves - 0.25 tsp
- Salt - a pinch
- Water - 3 tablespoons
Cooking gingerbread with cognac and cocoa:
- For the dough, put honey in a bowl, put in a water bath, add sugar and butter and, stirring, heat until a homogeneous mass is formed.
- Remove the bowl from heat, cool slightly and add the beaten eggs with cognac.
- Finely grate the orange zest and ginger root and add to the honey mixture.
- Combine flour with baking soda, vanilla sugar, cinnamon, ground cardamom, anise, cloves and cocoa powder.
- Combine the dry with the liquid mixture and knead the dough, which will be quite thick and homogeneous in consistency. Wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for 4 hours.
- Sprinkle the parchment paper with flour, lay out the dough and roll out the crust. Depending on whether you want to get a gingerbread cookie, softer and thicker or thinner and harder, the thickness of the crust will depend.
- Use special figures to cut out Christmas cookies with ginger so that there is space between them, because they will increase in volume during baking and may stick together.
- Remove the scraps of dough, transfer the parchment with figures to a baking sheet and place in a preheated oven to 180 ° C for 7-10 minutes. The finished gingerbread cookie should be golden brown, firm and soft at the same time.
- Cool the cookies and sugar coat with a cooking syringe. To do this, mix the icing sugar with water. If you replace some of the water with lemon juice, the frosting will not be as sweet.
- Leave the iced gingerbread cookies to dry for a few hours.
Gingerbread gingerbread on the christmas tree
Decorate the Christmas tree with sweet Christmas decorations and there will be no limit to children's delight! For this purpose, beautiful, fragrant and delicious New Year's gingerbread on the Christmas tree are perfect.
Ingredients:
- Flour - 500 g
- Honey - 250 g
- Ginger - 1.5 tsp
- Butter - 100 g
- Ground cinnamon - 2 tsp
- Ground cardamom - 1.5 tsp
- Egg yolks - 3 pcs.
- Lemon juice - 15 ml
- Brown sugar - 125 g
- Carnation - 20 pcs.
- Powdered sugar - 50 g
- Chocolate - 100 g
Cooking gingerbread gingerbread on a Christmas tree:
- Pour sugar into a saucepan and add butter. Heat the contents, stirring continuously until a homogeneous syrup is obtained. Add honey to a saucepan and stir.
- Sift flour into a bowl and mix with all the ground spices. Add yolks and honey syrup. Knead the dough until smooth and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
- After a certain time, roll out the dough into a layer 5 mm thick and cut out the figures, which you put on a baking sheet lined with oiled paper.
- Punch holes in the items with a beverage straw.
- Send the gingerbread cookies to bake in the oven at a temperature of 185 degrees for 15 minutes.
- Decorate the cooled New Year's gingerbread with a pattern of melted chocolate or sugar icing. To do this, mix the icing sugar with lemon juice until a smooth paste.
- After the chocolate or icing has set, thread the ribbons into the items and decorate the Christmas tree with gingerbread.
Homemade gingerbread for New Year and Christmas
Soft glazed gingerbread cookies with healthy spices, covered with a thin crust of citrus-sugar glaze … The aroma of honey, ginger, cinnamon and oranges fills the house with a pre-holiday and New Year mood, and also gives comfort, warmth and hospitality.
Ingredients:
- Flour - 500 g
- Honey - 2 tablespoons
- Ground ginger - 1 tsp
- Eggs - 2 pcs.
- Sugar - 1 tbsp.
- Butter - 60 g
- Soda - 2 tsp without slide
- Ground cinnamon - 1 tsp
- Ground nutmeg - 0.25 tsp
- Ground cloves - 0.25 tsp
- Turmeric - a pinch
- Salt - a pinch
- Powdered sugar - 100 g
- Lemon juice - 2 tablespoons
Cooking homemade gingerbread for New Year and Christmas:
- Melt honey, sugar and chopped butter over low heat or in a water bath. The butter should melt and the sugar grains should dissolve.
- Beat the eggs with baking soda until fluffy and pour into the heated sweet mixture. Stir quickly until frothy and remove container from heat.
- Combine the sifted flour with all dry spices and immediately gradually add to the liquid mixture. Start mixing the dough. At first, the dough will be liquid and hot, so it will be impossible to knead with your hands. But then the dough will become thicker and not so hot. The finished dough should be soft so as not to stick to your hands, but not too steep.
- Sprinkle the work surface with flour and roll out the dough about 1 cm thick.
- Cut out the circles with a glass and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment. Leave a small distance of about 2-3 cm between the products, because when baking, it will do.
- Send the gingerbread to a preheated oven to 200 ° C for 10-12 minutes. The finished gingerbread will be 2 times higher and browned well. Leave them to cool completely.
- Prepare the icing. To do this, combine the icing sugar with citrus juice and stir with a spoon until smooth. Pour the icing on the top of the gingerbread and spread it over the entire area with your finger directly.
