Crispy Gingerbread

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What’s Christmas without gingerbread? I would like to share here the recipe that my mother uses for decades to make gingerbread.

Preparation of the dough: 1 hour
Level: Not too challenging
Quantity: a good box full of gingerbread cookies

Ingredients.
Dough:
400g of good quality butter
2 larger eggs
0.25 tsp of salt
1-2 tablespoons of gingerbread seasoning (Santa Maria’s is ok), but if you want to experiment, you can try mixing your own mixture.
1.5 teaspoons of soda
1 kg of AP wheat flour
500g of sugar
250ml of water

Preparation:
Dough:

  1. Boil the water.
  2. Melt half of the sugar and caramelize in a large heavy-bottomed pot over medium or higher heat. When the sugar is nicely brown, carefully and little by little add 250ml of boiling water. Reduce heat to low. Be careful with the steam, stir constantly.
  3. Add the second half of the sugar, dissolve while stirring. Let it boil until the mixture starts to brown. It is a cognitive process. If you want gingerbread with a darker and slightly burnt sugar taste, you can let the syrup be dark brown, if you want lighter gingerbread, let the syrup brown.
  4. Cool the syrup to room temperature. Melt butter, add eggs, salt, seasoning and finally flour mixed with soda.
  5. Knead the dough until smooth, wrap it in cling film and put it in the fridge. You can bake it the next day, but the best result is if you keep the dough in the refrigerator for a few weeks. In the meantime, you can taste it and add seasonings as needed.
  6. Before baking, bring the dough to room temperature, heat the oven to 200 degrees, sprinkle flour on the work surface, roll the dough to a thickness of about 3-4 mm, form the desired shapes and bake for about 8 minutes (the time depends on the characteristics of the oven).

Glaze:

  1. ¾ glass of powdered sugar
  2. 1 egg white
  3. 1 teaspoon of lemon juice

Preparation:

  1. Mix the egg whites to a very stiff foam, add sugar little by little, continue mixing, add lemon juice.
    Prepare as much icing as needed to decorate the gingerbread.
    You can use strong plastic bags with the corner cut off, special sprays, you can also make white gingerbread by brushing the glaze on the gingerbread to apply the glaze the gingerbread cookies.
    Done!!