Gingerbread Men

Previously, I shared my Gingerbread Cupcakes recipe - but I couldn’t help myself and did a little more festive baking. So today, I bring you Gingerbread Men - something everyone should make (or at least eat!) every Christmas.

Ingredients:

• 75g light brown sugar
• 2 tbsp golden syrup
• 1 tbsp black treacle
• 1 tbsp water
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1 rounded tsp ground ginger
• pinch of cloves
• finely grated zest of 1/2 orange
• 95g butter
• 1/2 tsp of bicarbonate of soda
• 225g plain flour (and some more if needed)

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C for a normal oven or 160°C for a fan oven or gas mark 4 for a gas oven. Also get two non-stick baking trays ready or just normal trays with non-stick parchment paper.
2. Put the sugar, golden syrup, black treacle, water, spices and orange zest in a saucepan and bring to the boil - making sure to be stirring all the time. 
3. Remove the saucepan from the heat. Cut the butter into chunks and add to the saucepan, at the same time add the bicarbonate of soda and stir until the butter has melted.
4. Now add the flour and stir until you have a manageable dough - if needed you can add some more flour. I did add a little bit more until the dough stopped sticking to the pan.
5. Similar to shortbread you need to leave the dough in a cool place to rest. I actually put it in the fridge for 30 minutes. I suppose you could put in the freezer for half the time.
6. Once cooled, remove from the cool place/fridge or freezer and roll the dough out onto a floured surface until around 3mm thick. Then using water cutters you want - I used a medium gingerbread man cutter. Cut out and transfer to the baking trays. I managed to get 15 of them before the dough run out.
7. Put into the oven for 10-15 minutes. Mine were actually starting to burn around 10 minutes ... but my oven was a tad too hot. So just be careful and watch them.
8. Remove from the oven and leave them on the baking tray for 5 minutes then transfer to a wire cooling rack. They will seem soft and uncooked when removed but this is okay - they will be soft as they harden when cooling so don't transfer straight away or then bend.
9. I then decorated with designer white icing - if you have the time you can outline them or do some fancy designs or write some names on them. I just did little smiling faces.
10. Store in an airtight container and take them to work and give them to everyone.