Hard Christmas gingerbread biscuits

Let’s skip the bit about how fat I am and how much it’s starting to get on my nerves. As I wrote today on the PrymitywnaKuchnia fan page on Facebook, I promised my daughter that next week, when we’re together, we’ll make a gingerbread “house” together.

Our gingerbread creation can’t be made from the same stuff as the Christmas gingerbread I made with Ninka the other day. That one’s too thick and too soft. So today we tried a hard gingerbread. The traditionally hard kind.

But here we go again, making things that fatten you up. They sure put the pounds on a prize porker like me. It’s a disaster, but I’d do anything for my little girl.

So we got down to making these hard Christmas gingerbread biscuits. I’ll be honest, I’m no great fan of all the Christmas cheer. It only really rubs off on me because of Nina. Maybe that’s a good thing…

At a glance:

Prep time: 15 minutes

Baking time: 9 minutes

Oven temperature: 180 degrees Celsius

How many people does it serve? If we reckon one biscuit each is enough, more than 50 people

How many calories? Jingle bells, jingle bells, who’s thinking about calories then?

Ingredients for the hard gingerbread biscuits:

• 1/4 of a jar of honey (a 500 gram jar, so a fairly big one)
• 2 cups of flour
• half a cup of sugar
• 1/4 of a block of butter 
• 1 hen’s egg
• a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
• gingerbread spice mix (I use the whole 40 gram packet)
• 2 tablespoons of cocoa (I used Nesquik, the stuff for kids)

The recipe (here goes):

The recipe is pretty simple. Basically I mix all the ingredients together (I melt the butter to make things easier and, of course, the honey needs to be runny) and knead them into a smooth, sticky dough. If it’s too sticky, I add a little flour. Don’t worry if it’s not as stretchy as, say, pizza dough. It can be a little crumbly.

Once the dough is ready, I roll it out a piece at a time. I cut out shapes, or Ninka and I make up our own, and we lay them on a baking tray lined with baking paper. Each tray goes in the oven for exactly 9 minutes. We got more than 50 biscuits (though Ninka made hers quite small), so we baked them in four batches.

We decorate them with icing, coloured icing this time. These gingerbread biscuits keep really well. They’re fairly soft when they come out of the oven, but soon after they’ve cooled they turn nice and hard. And tasty. Pretty sweet, too. Enjoy!