If there is anything that can make the holidays brighter and more festive it’s a colorful jumble of homemade cookies. You probably think that a chef would have some impressive recipes up her sleeve, but my contribution has always been the nothing-fancy gingerbread cutouts.
It may be my Eastern European blood or possibly my love of all things ginger. As a child, I remember standing with my mother in a Hamtramck bakery yearning for a huge, puffy gingerbread cookie pasted with a sticker of an old-fashioned St. Nick. Every holiday visiting the Polish markets and lusting after old St. Nick, I pestered my mother. She finally broke down and bought me one. I dutifully hung the cookie up on our tree and eagerly waited until Christmas day to take my first bite. It was dry, stale and bland. The disappointment I felt set me on a quest for the perfect gingerbread cookie.
Almost every European country has a spiced cookie in its ancestry; the Germans have lebkuchen, the British make gingerbread and ginger biscuits, the Dutch have speculaas and the Scandinavians have peppernott and pepparkaka. Lebkuchen is not exactly American gingerbread. It belongs to baked goods flavored with cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg and sweetened with honey, molasses or brown sugar, but it is not a crisp gingerbread cookie. Lebkuchen is soft, dense and often laced with nuts, with a cake-like texture.
Some historians believe that our modern gingerbread cookies came to the Midwest by way of Swiss Catholic monks. Gingerbread cookies were considered healthy food, which traveled well, so the monks brought them to their infirm and the sick. (Ginger is an effective remedy for nausea and other stomach ailments.) Einsiedeln Abbey and St. Gallen in Switzerland were among the most famous monasteries. Monks from Einsiedeln founded Indiana’s St. Meinrad Archabbey in 1854. These brothers may have been among those who brought the first gingerbread recipe to America by way of southern Indiana.
The English made their first gingerbread cookies with treacle, golden syrup and brown sugar; Germans use honey; we Americans are fond of molasses. Ginger and cinnamon are the most important spices, but you might also find cardamom, nutmeg and ground cloves.
American recipes require either light or dark molasses. Light molasses comes from the first boiling of the sugar syrup and is lighter in flavor and color than the dark molasses, which comes from a second boiling and is darker with a more robust flavor. Molasses may be “sulphured” or “unsulphured” depending on whether sulphur was used in the processing. Unsulphured molasses is lighter colored with a delicate flavor. Molasses and honey add color, moistness and a rich flavor to baked goods. Substitute maple syrup and a dark honey for all or part of the molasses.
You may hang these cookies on your tree — use a plastic straw to poke a hole in the top before baking — but beware. Long ago, when I was living in a rental house, I enthusiastically baked, decorated and hung a tree full of gingerbread people. On Christmas morning I came downstairs to find parts of their heads, arms and legs chewed away by resident mice.
How do you like your gingerbread cookies? Recipes vary from thick and cakey to thin and crispy and delicately spiced to intensely gingery. Here is a collection of recipes so you can make the choice of what gingerbread cookies will join your Christmas cookie jumble.
Cookie Baking Tips
Invest in several heavy-duty commercial aluminum half-sheet pans—they reduce the risk of burning because aluminum is a superior heat conductor. Look for them in restaurant supply stores. Cover them with parchment baking paper to keep the pans cleaner and to save the step of greasing. Reuse the parchment paper.Preheat your oven at least 15 minutes before baking. This evens out the temperature.When baking several pans of cookies at a time make sure to rotate them front to back and top rack to bottom halfway through their baking time. They will bake more evenly.Invest in good timer able to time two or more items at a time. It will save you many headaches and overbaked cookies.Don’t put cookie dough on warm baking sheets. Rinse pan under cold water and dry before reusing or allow sheet pan to cool fully before baking another batch.Cool cookies completely on a rack before storing. Excess moisture will make them soggy.Store cookies in a cool place between layers of waxed paper in tins or plastic containers.
Decorated Gingerbread Cookies
These are a bit cakey with a lovely level of spice.
About 4 dozen 2- to 3-inch cookies
2/3 C. molasses, unsulphured or robust
2/3 C. packed brown sugar
4 t. ground ginger
2 t. ground cinnamon
1/2 t. ground nutmeg
1/2 t. ground clove
1/2 t. salt
2 t. baking soda
1 C. unsalted butter, diced into small bits
1 large egg, whisked
4 to 5 C. unbleached all purpose flour
Royal Icing plus other decorations like candies, nuts and dried fruit
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Bring molasses, brown sugar, spices and salt to a boil. Remove from heat, scrape into a large mixing bowl and stir in baking soda (it will foam up). Stir several pieces of butter at a time until all is melted. Stir in egg then 3-3/4 cups flour to the molasses-butter mixture. Add the remaining flour as is necessary for a tender, but not sticky dough. Use leftover flour to dust the work surface. Knead dough for half a minute until soft and pliable.
Divide dough into four pieces and press each into a rectangle and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate dough until firm enough to roll, 1 hour; refrigerate dough 20 minutes whenever it gets too soft.
Line several cookie sheets with parchment. Roll one piece of dough on a lightly floured surface 1/4 to 3/8 inch thick. Cut dough with flour-dusted cutters and arrange on pans an inch or two apart. Repeat with remaining dough. Re-roll the scraps and cut. Bake cookies until firm and risen, 7 to 10 minutes. Cool on racks. Prepare Royal Icing and decorate cookies.
Royal Icing
Meringue powder (with added sweetener) or plain powdered egg whites are safe to consume without heating. With the help of meringue powder and overnight drying, this icing will harden so that you can stack and package these cookies.
Yields about 3 cups
1 lb. (about 4 cups) powdered sugar
3 T. meringue powder
1/4 C. water
1 t. vanilla or almond extract
In a large bowl, stir together powdered sugar and meringue powder. With a hand mixer or stand mixer, slowly whisk in water (add slowly) and flavoring on low speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes. Do not overbeat! If the mixture seems dry and crumbly, add teaspoons of water until it comes together as a thick icing. Stiff consistency for spreading with a spatula forms a stiff peak and does not move after a spoon is lifted from the surface. Piping consistency for piping on cookies forms a gentle peak that curls over and moves slightly when a spoon is lifted from the surface. Flooding consistency looks like Elmer’s Glue.
Royal icing takes about 8 hours to fully harden, but it will start to crust very quickly. Divide icing into several bowls and add food coloring if desired. It’s best to use gel food coloring when coloring or tinting icing; the color is concentrated and won’t alter the consistency of the icing. Keep plastic wrap pressed onto icing to keep crust from forming. Use a snipped end of a plastic bag to pipe icing or frost it with a small spatula.
Swedish Ginger Cookies
Thick (3/8 to 1/2 inch) and not baked too dry will be gingerbread cookies and thinner (1/8 to 1/4 inch) and baked dry-ish will be more like a crispy gingersnap. Adapted from “Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies”
2/3 C. dark or light molasses
2/3 C. sugar
1 T. ground ginger
1 T. ground cinnamon
5-1/3 oz. or 10-2/3 T. unsalted room temperature butter
3/4 T. baking soda
1 egg
5 C. sifted unbleached all-purpose flour
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. In a heavy 2-quart saucepan bring the molasses, sugar and spices to a low boil, stirring. Cut the butter into small pieces and place in a mixing bowl. When the molasses boils, stir in the baking soda until it foams, scrape over the butter and stir to melt the butter.
Beat egg lightly and stir into the molasses-butter mixture. Gradually stir in the flour with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula. Scrape the dough onto a work surface and lightly knead until dough is evenly mixed. Cut the dough in half and cover one. Dust a rolling pin and work surface with a bit of flour and roll the other half of the dough to desired thickness.
Bake cookies until firm to the touch: thinner, crisp cookies take about 13 to 15 minutes while the thicker ones will take about 15 minutes but will be chewier. Transfer cookies with a large metal spatula and cool them on a rack.
Martha Stewart’s Basic Gingerbread Cookies
Makes about 16 large cookies
6 C. sifted all-purpose flour
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. baking powder
1 C. (2 sticks) unsalted butter
1 C. dark-brown sugar, packed
4 t. ground ginger
4 t. ground cinnamon
1 1/2 t. ground cloves
1 t. finely ground black pepper
1 1/2 t. salt
2 large eggs
1 C. unsulfured molasses
In a large bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Set aside. In an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream butter and sugar until fluffy. Mix in spices and salt, then eggs and molasses. Add flour mixture; combine on low speed. Divide dough in thirds; wrap in plastic. Chill for at least 1 hour.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. On a floured work surface, roll dough 1/8 inch thick. Cut into desired shapes. Transfer to ungreased baking sheets; refrigerate until firm, 15 minutes. Bake until crisp but not darkened, 7 to 10 minutes. Let cookies cool on wire racks then decorate as desired.
Martha Stewart’s Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies
Makes 2 dozen
7 oz. best-quality semisweet chocolate
1-1/2 C. plus 1 T. all-purpose flour
1-1/4 t. ground ginger
1 t. ground cinnamon
1/4 t. ground cloves
1/4 t. ground nutmeg
1 T. cocoa powder
8 T. (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 T. freshly grated ginger
1/2 C. dark-brown sugar, packed
1/2 C. unsulfured molasses
1 t. baking soda
1/4 C. granulated sugar
Line two baking sheets with parchment. Chop chocolate into 1/4-inch chunks; set aside. In a medium bowl, sift together flour, ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and cocoa.
In the bowl of an electric mixer, fitted with the paddle attachment, beat butter and grated ginger until whitened, about 4 minutes. Add brown sugar; beat until combined. Add molasses; beat until combined.
In a small bowl, dissolve baking soda in 1 1/2 teaspoons boiling water. Beat half of flour mixture into butter mixture. Beat in baking-soda mixture, then remaining half of flour mixture. Mix in chocolate; turn out onto a piece of plastic wrap. Pat dough out to about 1-inch thick; seal with wrap; refrigerate until firm, 2 hours or more.
Heat oven to 325°F. Roll dough into 1-1/2- inch balls; place 2 inches apart on baking sheets. Refrigerate 20 minutes. Roll in granulated sugar. Bake until the surfaces crack slightly, 10 to 12 minutes. Let cool 5 minutes; transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
St. Meinrad Gingerbread Cookies
These iced cookies can be used on any festive occasion: simply draw liturgical symbols for the corresponding feast day on them.
Adapted from “Holy Housewifery Cookbook” by Ethel Marbach, Abbey Press, Saint Meinrad, Indiana, 1968
1/4 C. melted butter
1/2 C. warm molasses
1/2 C. brown sugar
1 7/8 C. of flour
1/3 t. each: soda, salt, ginger, cloves, cinnamon
1/8 t. each: nutmeg, allspice
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Mix butter, molasses and sugar. Add sifted dry ingredients. Roll very thin. Cut with large heart shape cutter. Bake, until set but not browned, about 6 minutes. Ice with almond flavored Royal Icing.