Gingerbread

Not just a seasonal food, the sweet and spicy mix that is gingerbread is yummy, with or without frosting. Plus it keeps well and makes a semi-healthy portable snack.

Gingerbread


makes 48 1/8 inch thick cookies

1/2 cup butter*
3/4 cup brown sugar, dark or golden
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon
1 Tbsp plus 1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
2 cups flour

*1/2 tsp salt, if using unsalted butter

Mix the butter and sugar together in a large bowl.
Cream in the molasses, egg and vanilla.
Stir in the spices, baking powder and baking soda.
Beat in the flour until the dough comes together. It's okay if it's slightly tacky.
Cover and chill at least an hour.
When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 F.
Lightly dust the counter with flour and pull out half the dough.
Roll out to an 1/8 inch thick, or desired thickness, and cut into your favourite shapes.
The dough doesn't suffer from being re-rolled, so save the scraps to fill your cookie sheets.
Cook for about 5 minutes if 1/8 inch thick, or until brown around the edges and a little firm.
Repeat with other half of dough.

Serve plain or you can ice them when cool. Buttery and yummy either way.

This is technically a gingerbread house recipe, so it would probably keep a month on the counter, but I'd suggest freezing in a sturdy container for the best results.

Basic Confectioner's Icing


makes about a cup and a bit

2 1./2 cups icing sugar, sifted
2 Tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 Tbsp milk, plus a little more

Melt the butter and stir in the vanilla.
Add the icing sugar and then spoon the milk over.
Stir to saturate everything. If it's too dry or too stiff add more milk a teaspoon at a time until you have a damp, spreadable icing. Too liquidy and it won't harden and last.

This recipe makes plain white, as you can see from the photo, but you can experiment with adding food colour to make your desired colours to jazz them up.

Enjoy!

Almond Shortbread

Ha, a reason to use the ground almonds. Mom wanted almond shortbread...well, almond cookies, but it turned into just wanting a butter-flour-sugar-ground almond thing. It didn't take all the ground almonds I made though, since 2/3 lb turned into almost 4 cups.

This recipe started from Joy of Cooking again, since the internet failed me. It's based on their Almond Crescents, which I stumbled across last year when looking up ground almond recipes, but last year I ended up going with Fanny Farmer's version. It calls for sifting things, and usually I'm not that big on sifting, since lumps come out if you beat it long enough, but since shortbread is delicate, I totally recommend it because it just makes everything easier.

Flaky, icing sugar dusted almondy goodness!

Almond Shortbread


makes 24 medium pieces, or however you want to cut it due to richness

1 c unsalted butter, softened
1 c icing sugar, sifted
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp almond extract
1 to 1 1/2 cups ground almonds
1/4 tsp cinnamon (more if you want, but then it just drowns out the almonds...)
2 1/2 cups flour, sifted

Preheat oven to 350 F. Get out a glass 9" x 13" pan.
In a large bowl (really large, cuz it's messy), cream butter and icing sugar.
Mix in vanilla and almond extract and ground almonds.
Sift first cup of flour and cinnamon on the mix and combine.
Sift and stir each remaining half cup of flour in separately.
Use your hands to lightly kneed out any dry spots if it's too hard to stir gently.
Pour into pan and lightly press out evenly.
Cook about 30 mins, or until not raw looking, brown on bottom and lightly brown on top.

Important!!! Score or cut while still warm with a sharp knife, or else it shatters instead of cutting cleanly (as I learned this time around since I wasn't following a shortbread recipe...)

If you are going to treat it like a shortbread, you technically need to leave it sit a week, but it's good right away once cool.

Enjoy!