Latvian gingerbread cookies

In Latvia gingerbread cookies are very typical for Christmas. Around that time, every single house is filled with gingerbread cookie smell. In Latvia, you usually buy the gingerbread cookie dough and bake them at home, but living abroad this isn’t possible. So, for the third year in a row, I’m preparing my gingerbread cookie dough myself. I still don’t get the perfect consistency, but the taste and smell are better than the store-bought ones.  Prepare your home for Christmas and bake some cookies!

Yield: ca. 4kg of dough (which means –  a lot of cookies!)

Ingredients:

• 400g honey
• 400g brown (or white) sugar
• 400g butter
• 1,5kg-2kg flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 20-30g of gingerbread spices: you can mix them yourself  using cinnamon, cardamon, nutmeg, ginger, black pepper… or just buy a prepared gingerbread spices packet, for instance from Santa Maria (from Sweden)

Step by step: 

• Put the honey, butter, half of the sugar, and the spices in a pot and place them on a medium heat.

• Meanwhile, put the remaining sugar in another pot and start to caramelize it.

• Once the sugar is well caramelized (take care not to burn it!) add half a glass of hot water and mix it well together.

• Take the caramelized sugar and pour it into the honey, butter, and sugar mixture. Mix it all well together and heat it till it boils.

• Take the mixture away form the heat and let it cool down for 30min. With the help of a big wooden spoon, mix part of the flour into it.

• Pour the mixture into a plastic bowl and mix rest of the flour as well as the baking soda into it, using your hands. In total, I used around 1.5kg of flour. Make sure that you knead it all well together, until  you get a nice, homogeneous and consistent dough.

• Part the dough into three parts, wrap each of them in plastic wrap and place them in the fridge. Ideally, you should make the dough 2-3 weeks before baking the gingerbread cookies. But you can try to make them from one day to the next, or even in the same day.

• Preheat you oven up to 200ºC.
• To be able to work well with the dough, it should be slightly warmer than the room temperature. I usually warm it up in a microwave or oven and then mold it with my hands.
• Place the dough on a lightly floured work surface. Roll out the dough until it is 1-2mm thin.
• With the help of cookie cutters, cut out the cookies in the shapes you like best and place them on a cooking pan covered with baking paper.
• Bake the cookies for ca. 5-10min or until lightly brown.

Enjoy!