This month's bonus recipe comes from our Marketing Manager Ellen, and her newfound love for baking biscuits!
This recipe is dairy free, making it vegan friendly, and creates perfectly soft in the middle, crunchy on the edges gingerbread that you can cut into any shape.
Make a big batch and get everyone involved in the decorating for a festive way to spend an afternoon.
Makes 8-10 gingerbread men
Ingredients
100g dairy free butter/spread/margarine
50g muscovado sugar
250g plain or self raising flour
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda (skip this if you're using self raising flour)
1-2 tsps of ground ginger (to taste)
1 tsp of ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp of allspice (optional)
5 heaped tbsp golden syrup
Method
- Heat a saucepan of water on the stove, and place a mixing bowl on top to create a bain marie. Once the water is boiling, turn the heat down and add your butter to the bowl. Stir occasionally until it's completely melted (don't let it boil!) and then add the muscovado sugar and stir until it's fully dissolved.
- Remove your bowl from the heat (watch your fingers here) and add in your dry ingredients, mixing until fully combined. Then add in your golden syrup, and mix again until everything is brought together.
- At this point, your mixture should have a consistency similar to cookie dough. It should be dry enough that you can form it into a loose mound in the bowl. If your mixture is too wet at this point, add in another tbsp of flour until you reach the right consistency.
- Tip your dough out onto clingfilm and wrap it up and pop it in the fridge to rest for around 30 minutes. Too little time in the fridge and the dough will be too sloppy to roll and cut, and too long will make it too solid to roll out properly.
- Remove your dough from the fridge and pre-heat the oven to 180c/350f/gas mark 4.
- Roll your dough out on a floured surface to around 1cm thick and cut out your biscuits, re-rolling until you've used all of your dough. Try to do this step quickly as the dough will warm up and become too soft to work with, and might need to chill again for 5 minutes until you can continue.
- Place your biscuits on a baking tray lined with baking paper, and pop in the oven for 14-18 minutes. The longer you bake them for, the crunchier they will be. Just keep an eye on them to make sure the edges don't burn!
- Remove from the oven and leave to cool completely before decorating with your icing of choice - I like to buy pre-made icing tubes for ease, but you can easily mix icing sugar and water together at home and use a piping bag!
- Allow the icing to set for a few hours, and dig in.
