Well Christmas may be over, but my kitchen is still full of leftover cookies.
I meant to share my recipe for the decorated snowflakes the other day, but we spent 3 days just relaxing, cooking at home and enjoying the holidays together. I hope you, dear readers, also got to spend time with your loved ones.
So, this belated recipe is for my friend�s Swedish Gingerbread Cookies. My friend, Connie, has lived in Istanbul for 40-plus years since she is married to a Turk, and they made the city their home. She is a wonderful baker and cook and happily shared this recipe with me when we lived in the same city.
If you love gingerbread cookies, this is one recipe you�ll definitely want to save for next year�s holiday baking. The only problem is that the recipe makes a LOT of cookies. My batch yielded 132 cookies at last count. Of course, it depends on what size of cookie cutter you use too.
The more cookies you have, the more you have to share!
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| Besides snowflakes, I also decorated some Christmas trees and poinsettias with Royal Icing. |
We have friends arriving from the U.S. this afternoon, so we�ll be showing them around Warsaw, introducing them to Polish vodka and ringing in the new year together. Hopefully, they will help eat my cookies too!
Happy holidays wherever you may be!
Swedish Gingerbread Cookies
Yields: about 150 cookies.
2 � cup (490 g.) granulated sugar
5 oz. (150 ml.) water
3 oz. (100 g.) molasses (Polish: melasa trzcinowa or Turkish: �z�m pekmezi)**
1 � Tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 � teaspoons ground cloves
1 Tablespoons ground ginger
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10 oz. (285 g.) butter, room temperature
1 Tablespoons cognac or brandy
2 � teaspoons baking soda
6 cups (1000 g.) all-purpose flour or 480 typ Szymanowska Polish flour
In a large bowl placed over a simmering pot to create a bain marie, add the sugar, water spices and molasses into the bowl. Heat until the sugar dissolves, stirring often with a spoon. This will take about 10 minutes.
Remove the bowl from the heat. Stir in the butter.
Next, mix the baking soda with the cognac. Pour this mixture into the molasses mixture.
When the ingredients have cooled to room temperature, add in the flour. The dough will be very thick at this point so I donned some plastic gloves and ended up �kneading� the dough a bit until all the flour was worked in.
Separate the dough into five or six pieces. Flatten the dough into small square packets about 1-inch thick. Wrap in plastic wrap and let rest about an hour.
Then, on a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough very thin. Cut out various shapes and place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper.
Bake at 350F/175C for about 10 minutes, until slightly browned on the edges.
You can re-roll your dough scraps to make more cookies.
Once cool, decorate your cookies with my Royal Icing recipe, candies and sugar sprinkles.
**Note: Molasses seems to be difficult to find here in Poland. I found my molasses at the Organic Farma stores here in Warsaw.
