Gingerbread Galore!

The lovely bloggers Helen from Grab Your Fork and Suze from chocolatesuze recently organised a massive Xmas party for Sydney food bloggers. Everyone brought along a dish to share and needless to say with around 50 food bloggers in attendance, we ended up with huge amounts of food. Check out these posts for more foodie madness!

Amongst a tiered platter of classic kids favourites, "Elvis" cupcakes, a slow cooked Bo Ssam, chicken wings, a Makoto sushi platter and other delicious offerings, I made some iced gingerbread cookies for the occasion (recipe below).

A few days later I also decided to try out raspberri cupcakes' mini gingerbread houses. These turned out great and now there is a cute little gingerbread house sitting on my dining table awaiting it's destruction on Christmas Day! 

I didn't make all four houses in the recipe so I had some dough leftover for some gingerbread Christmas trees and gingerbread men to decorate the garden around my house. The house was very sturdy and the measurements for the house were perfect! Thanks Steph :)

It's not quite finished yet - on the day I intend on sprinkling some sifted icing sugar for some snow and also putting a puff of smoke from the chimney using mini marshmallows and an unravelled paperclip, as shown in the raspberri cupcakes recipe. More photos will be posted up of the finished product later.

Gingerbread Cookies

2 cups flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
90g butter
1/3 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar

1. Sift flour, soda and ginger into a bowl. Place butter, sugar and golden syrup into a saucepan and cook over low heat until butter melts and sugar dissolves. Cool.

2. Pour the syrup into the flour mixture and combine. Take the dough out of the bowl and knead until smooth. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for 30 minutes.

3. Preheat oven to 180ºC. Line 2 baking trays with baking paper. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface to desired thickness (I rolled mine out to about 4-5mm). The dough might start to crack while you are rolling it but keep rolling and it should come back together. Cut out shapes and carefully place onto trays.

4. Bake in oven for 6-8 minutes (the longer you bake them the crunchier they will be). Cool biscuits on trays for 5 minutes because they will still be soft, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Royal Icing
1 egg white
1 1/2 cups icing sugar

Beat egg white until frothy then gradually beat in icing sugar 1/2 cup at a time until the mixture is combined. Add food colouring if desired then place icing into piping bag with a round tip and pipe onto cookies.