12 Days of Christmas: Gingerbread Men

❤ Day Seven ❤

Christmas baking project number one... GINGERBREAD MEN! These took me 2 batches to get right, simply because I love the flavor of ginger and was looking for a heavily flavored gingerbread man recipe (think ginger snaps... love those).  I tripled the amount of ground ginger in the original recipe I found, and also added a hint of cinnamon. The tweaked batch came out the perfect level of ginger-ness, so much that I'm finding it kind of hard to give them away!

My recipe:

For the cookies

2 cups of flour

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

3 tablespoons of ground ginger

1 teaspoon of ground cinnamon

1 cup firmly packed dark brown/cane sugar

150g butter (softened)

1 egg (beaten)

cookie cutter

For decorating the cookies

cookie icing

mini M&Ms

1. Sift the flour, baking soda, ground ginger and ground cinnamon into a big bowl. Add in brown sugar

2. Using an electric beater or your fingers, blend the softened butter into the flour mixture until the mix looks like fine crumbs (note: this might take a while!)

3. Add in beaten egg, mix until dough forms. If dough is too moist, add a bit of flour

4. Wrap dough in cling wrap, refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 180c while waiting for dough in the fridge.

5. On floured surface, roll out dough to about 5mm thick. Cut out gingerbread men cookies. Lay on a baking tray.

6. Bake cookies for 8-10 minutes, or until edges turn slightly golden brown

7. Cool completely and decorate with icing and M&Ms. Have fun!

I managed to make 16 cookies with this recipe.

Meet the gingerbread gang. Edward, Nelson, Simon, Paul, Francesco and Waldo.

And the funky bunch that my brother made...

I got these cute cookie bags from a local baking supplies store that are perfect for individually packaging the gingerbread cookies as gifts.

With the twist tie that came with the cookie bags, I also attached my homemade Christmas cards to each bag by punching a hole on the corner of the card. A thoughtful message makes the perfect compliment to a sweet Christmas cookie :)

6 days till Christmas!