Gingerbread house with path. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve used this gingerbread cookie recipe for a long time to make gingerbread men and women, and also to put together gingerbread houses for the Christmas season. If done right, it makes up into a dough that cooks up crisply and that will hold up to the rigors of being frosting glued into a holiday gingerbread house. I’m not wonderful using pastry bags to frost too finely, so I resort to using those plastic tubes of frosting that can be found in the baking section of a supermarket. They come in all colors and some even have changeable tips to make different decorating effects for the finished cookies. Use whatever shape of cookie cutters move you, but I still prefer the gingerbread men and Santa’s to make gingerbread shapes that can be punched with a hole and hung as decorations, too. The recipe is as follows:
1/4 lb. pound unsalted butter (not margarine)
1 cup molasses
1 cup brown sugar
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 large egg well beaten
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons dried ginger powder
1/4 cup boiling water
Cream butter and sugar until blended and light. Add the egg and molasses. Mix well. Dissolve the baking soda in the boiling water. Sift the flour with the salt and ginger powder and add the hot water to the first mixture and then stir this into the dry ingredients. Chill this for at least one hour. Roll the dough very thin and cut with a cookie cutter of your choosing which has been dipped in flour. Bake in 375 degree Fahrenheit oven for approximately 15 minutes being careful to watch closely as these can burn quickly. Cookies should be firm but not overly browned.
Cookies can be used as walls and roof for a gingerbread house with either a pre-bought kit or cut freehand from your own pattern.
Serving amount dependent on size of your cookie cutters. I use a 2 inch cutter. You can also make ornament shaped ones using a 2 inch glass rim dipped in flour and then decorated with sugar frosting and sprinkles.
“The snow had begun n the gloaming.
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white.
-LOWELL
The World Holidays and Traditions Reader 