It’s the time of year where every time I decide to bake something, I want comforting and heavily spiced. Enter: gingerbread. It’s perfect for a dark winter evening and it’s one of the easiest things you can bake as it requires no fancy equipment and is almost foolproof.

This recipe is intended for anyone to be able to use, including if you’ve never baked anything before. It’s also a great recipe to make with children in the run up to Christmas.

It’s as simple as warming through the butter, sugar and syrup and adding that to your dry ingredients in a big bowl to form a dough. I used this recipe from BBC good food, tweaked it to add more spices including nutmeg, and skipped the icing. The nice thing about gingerbread (or other spiced recipes) is that you can play around with quantities of spices to find a combination and intensity you prefer.

Prep time: 10 minutes (plus 1 hour for chilling)
Cook time: 9 minutes at 170C fan oven
Makes 18 biscuits (depending on size)

Ingredients:

• 100g salted butter
• 3 tbsp golden syrup
• 100g dark muscovado sugar
• ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tbsp ground ginger
• 1 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 225g plain flour

Equipment:

• Small saucepan
• Weighing scales
• Wooden spoon (I prefer a silicone spoon for easier cleaning, but it’s not necessary!)
• Small bowl for weighing ingredients
• Large mixing bowl
• Baking paper
• Cling film
• Baking tray

Method:

1. Put the butter, golden syrup and sugar in a pan and warm gently over a low to medium heat. Stir frequently until the butter is melted and the sugar and syrup start to combine with it. Take off the heat.
2. Put the remaining dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix the spices and bicarbonate of soda into the flour. Once combined, pour the butter mixture from the saucepan into the dry ingredients and stir to form a dough. It can be helpful to pour the butter mixture in two or three parts to make it easier to combine.
3. Put a sheet of baking paper down (it helps if this is roughly the size of your baking tray) and put the dough on top. Put a second sheet of baking paper on top and roll the dough until it’s 1/2cm thick. The shape of the dough doesn’t matter too much, but the thickness does. Wrap the dough in cling film and leave to cool in the fridge for 1 hour, where it will firm up.
4. Take out of the fridge, remove the clingfilm and cut into whatever shapes you like. If you don’t have a cookie cutter, you can turn a glass upside down and gently use that to produce even circles. Put on a baking tray with one of the baking sheets underneath and space them apart a little so they don’t merge into one another.
5. If you want the gingerbread to be chewy, try baking the biscuits for 9 minutes at 170 degrees fan, or until just turning golden brown. If you like them crunchier, give them a minute or two more. Timings will depend on how big your biscuits are, so keep an eye on them.
   
   Enjoy! Let me know how you got on in the comments section 🙂