A colleague asked me to make a gingerbread latte cake for his birthday tomorrow, which gave me a great opportunity to have another play with biscuit dough.
The cake actually only needed six little gingerbread fellas, but the recipe I’m using makes circa 100 little people. You’ll get about a third of this number making regular sized gingerbreads. It’s a lot of dough.
You will need:
350g plain flour
125g unsalted butter
175g light brown sugar
1 egg
4 tbsp golden syrup
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
3 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
- Stick the oven on gas mark 4 / 180ºC and line two baking trays with greaseproof paper
- Sift flour and add bicarbonate of soda, ginger and cinnamon
- Add the butter and mix together until combined – it should look a little breadcrumby
- mix the egg and golden syrup together and add to the rest of the mixture
- Mix it all until it sticks together. If the dough is too crumbly and dry, add a little water. If it’s too moist and sticky, add a bit more plain flour
- When you’re happy with the texture, pop the dough in some cling film and chill it in the fridge for about 15 minutes
- Sprinkle some flour on a clean surface and roll out your dough – you want it about half a cm thick
- Use the cutter to cut out your gingerbread men, or whatever shape you want. I was making a cricket fan’s cake, so had a play with making little cricket bats
- bake in the oven for 10-15 mins. Don’t worry if they seem a little soft when they come out, they’ll harden while cooling
- Finally, decorate however you like. Icing pens are simple and easy and available in most supermarkets, but you can go a bit crazy here if you want to
And it’s as simple as that. The dough can be frozen if you think there’s too much there for one sitting, just give it a good three hours to defrost when you take it out again.
Here are my little cricketing buddies in action on their cake. We did have one minor snappage disaster but a bit of icing and he’s good as new and ready for those runs.
Happy baking!
ten years in the baking 