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Heirloom Gingerbread Cookies II

The only change to this recipe is the omission of vanilla. It makes for a spicier gingerbread!

6 Cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
3 teaspoons ginger
3 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 & 1/2 teaspoon salt

2 sticks butter
1 Cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 Cup unsulfured molasses

Mix together all dry ingredients with a wire whisk. In a separate bowl or the bowl of your stand mixer, cream together, butter and sugar, then add eggs and vanilla. Mix in dry ingredients and molasses altering cups of each until done and a dough forms.

Divide dough into 4 balls and flatten. This dough works best if you use it right away but can be wrapped in plastic wrap and refrigerated. Allow to come to room temp. before baking with it.

When ready to bake, roll out dough onto Silpat. First cover dough with a sheet of plastic wrap, then roll out with the rolling pin. Cut out cookies and gently remove negative or extra dough from around them. You can do this by rolling up the extra dough with your finger once you pull up a piece. Leave the leftover cookie shapes on the same Silpat to bake. Bake for 10 minutes in a 350 Farenheit oven. Let cool on the Silpat on the cookie sheet while another batch bakes. Then transfer carefully with a long metal spatula to your storage container. This way your very large cookies won’t break. Put layers of wax paper between cookies so they won’t stick together in storage.

Oh my goodness it’s my favorite time of the year- Christmas baking! Every year for the past 5 years I have made Christmas cookies with royal icing for all of our friends and family. It started as a way to share my love of art in all forms during the holidays and as a way to use my beautiful Martha by Mail copper cookie cutters. It combines art, cookies, and baking! The last couple of years I’ve done Christmas trees and Rudolphs, but I wanted something new this year so I used the Nutcracker and Mouse King cutters instead.

This year my hubby said he wanted our old gingerbread cooky recipe (an old Fanny Farmer recipe) that we used before I started using my heirloom gingerbread recipe (a version based on the Martha by Mail gingerbread recipe). I made a batch of those for him. The old Fanny Farmer recipe is tasty, but they are hard to make, and don’t make the best cookies for decorating and sharing. HOWEVER, the spices are more pronounced than in my Heirloom version and, it turns out, that’s what Hubs liked about it. So, as I started making 1 of the 4 mega-sized batches of cookie dough for the present cookies I started to compare the recipes to try to figure out if I could tweak the heirloom recipe again.

The only thing that really stood out is the addition of vanilla to my heirloom recipe (which is not in the other recipe). Soooo, I took a “risk” and made the next batch without vanilla. (And no one stopped me!!!) Wowee! Did the spices ever shine after that! Turns out the vanilla really smoothed over the spices and subdued them greatly. Now this is fine, but I really wanted to taste those spices! So the rest of the batches I made I omitted the vanilla! Delicious! (Recipe is at the top of this post.)

Then it came time to decorate. I don’t know about my fellow bakers out there but royal icing can be the most persnickety thing you’ve ever worked with. It can either be perfect in every way or a horrible sloppy mess. And you could get both of those results from the same recipe! I think a lot has to do with humidity. I was so sick of trying to perfect my recipe that I finally went onto the great internets, found an amazing cookie decorator that measured everything when thinning the icing out (no guessing) and followed her directions. It was easy and successful!

Then it was on to the actual decorating. I had fun and used edible dragees, large sugar crystals, dusted some parts with sparkly sugar. And I just did the happy cooky dance back and forth taking my trays from the dining room (which is shut off from the animals and the heat this time of year) to the kitchen to decorate and then back again to the dining room!

Lastly, after a final drying time, it was time to bag them up and gift everyone we possibly could with the 61 huge cookies I ended up with (4 broke). If you were counting this was 4 batches of my recipe!

There! All done! How fun it was this year to make these! I also made some Noah’s ark animal cookies for our Christmas afternoon tea. That will be coming up! I hope you have fun making some cookies for yourself and I hope you try! Even if they don’t turn out well (I have had plenty of messy batches) they still taste great! Hubs hopes cookies break so he can dip them in the icing bowl and eat them while I’m decorating!

Merry Cooky Baking to You from Kansas Street,

-Jaime