Emma’s Festive Gingerbread Victims

The eighth day of our Crime Vault advent calendar brings you a recipe from our very own Emma who made her recipe with a little help from her daughter (you can catch Emma every Thursday on our Twitter feed @TheCrimeVault!)

Emma’s Gingerbread Victims!

I don’t think anything tastes as much like Christmas as gingerbread biscuits, so I wanted to share my favourite recipe, with an ‘interesting’ idea for the shapes that you are welcome to try, or ignore! (The victim part refers more to this biscuit shape than those people who have had the pleasure of eating the results, btw!) This recipe can be used with a food mixer or you can bring your muscles into play. So come on, roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

Ingredients

350g plain flour, 125g butter, 175g soft brown sugar, 1tsp bicarbonate of soda or baking powder, 3tsp ground ginger, 1tsp ground cinnamon, 1 egg,  4tbsp golden syrup.

 Method

Before you begin, gather together your biscuit cutters and icing pens – or if like me you want to create some shapes of your own, it is a good idea to produce your template before you get started on the baking. To create a gingerbread victim I drew my design (using Google images for inspiration!) onto a piece of A4 paper, and then traced over it using greaseproof paper. I then cut this out and put it to one side to apply later!

Next, grab a large mixing bowl and sift in the flour, bicarbonate of soda (or baking powder works just as well), cinnamon and ginger. Gently microwave the butter for a few seconds to soften it, and add. Mix together until the contents of your bowl start to resemble breadcrumbs and then stir in the sugar.

In another, smaller bowl break the egg and add the golden syrup, then softly whisk this lovely goo.

Add the egg and syrup gunky stuff to your main bowl and either mix or pulse until it all comes together and starts to resemble soft dough. Believe me, this recipe gives you a fantastic texture! Once you are happy with the mix, knead it to make it really smooth. Then wrap it in clingfilm and pop it in the fridge for around 15 minutes or so.

Next you can put the oven on to: 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4, and prepare your baking trays by lining them with greaseproof paper. Be warned, this recipe will produce a ton of biscuits, so you might need to bake in a couple of batches.

Whilst the oven is warming up you can get on with the really fun bit of creating the biscuit shapes!

Make lots of room on your work surface, and douse amply with flour. I find it best to divide the gingerbread dough into two as there is so much. Then roll it out as you please and cut out your shapes. Place the shapes (leaving a decent amount of space around them) on the trays.

To make the gingerbread victims I held my greaseproof paper template over the dough and cut round it with a knife. This was not the most economical way of creating the shapes, however, so if you have any thoughts of your own at this stage, do tweet them to @TheCrimeVault or @EmWilliamsBooks! My daughter in the meantime had great fun using our actual cutters to create more of a nativity scene.

Once you have filled two baking trays pop your first batch into the oven and bake for around 15 minutes (until they are light brown).  Let them cool for a minimum of ten minutes, and then move to cool, so you can pop your next batch into the oven. Leave until absolutely cool (we went out to the woods for a bit!) before commencing your next stage of decorating.

Then eat!