Christmas Advent Gingerbread Decorations
It's the most wonderful time of the year! Bake and make your own Christmas advent gingerbead decorations...one for each day up til Christmas!
Ingredients
- 300g Plain Flour
- 1 Tbsp Ground Ginger
- 120g Butter, (cubed)
- 120g Brown Sugar
- 140g Golden Syrup
You will need
- Baking Parchment
- Christmas Cookie Cutters (or cardboard to make templates)
- Icing (to decorate)
- String / Ribbon (for hanging)
- Plastic Straw
- Heat oven to 180C/160C fan/gas 4. Put the flour, ginger, butter and sugar in a processor, and mix together until you can’t see any lumps of butter. Pour in the syrup and mix to a smooth dough.
- Take about a quarter of the dough at a time and roll out between 2 sheets of baking parchment to the thickness of 0.C5cm. Peel away the top layer of parchment and use cookie cutters to make Christmas shapes – leaving about 2cm between each shape as they will spread as they cook. Peel away the dough trimmings and lift the parchment with the shapes onto a baking tray. Bake for 12-15 mins until firm.
- Remove from the oven and use a plastic straw to make a hole for hanging. Work quickly – if the biscuits cool and harden too much, the holes won’t be as neat – then pop the tray back in the oven for 1 min to re-warm.
- Continue rolling and shaping all the remaining dough and trimmings while you bake a tray at a time, until all the dough is used up and you have at least 24 biscuits. Cool completely, then decorate with icing (or whatever decorations you like) and string up as you wish.
- To make sparkly snowflakes: Stamp your biscuits out using different snowflake cutters. Decorate each biscuit differently by painting some with runny icing then dunking into edible glitters and sprinkles – it’s easier if you tip them onto a small, flat saucer first. Add more icing sugar to your runny icing to make a stiffer consistency, spoon into a piping bag and pipe on pretty details. You can pipe a number onto each with this icing too, if you want to make them true advent snowflakes!
