Gingerbread Cookies and/or House
Why I Love This Recipe
This is my favorite Christmas cookie recipe. It's the recipe my mom has been using since I was a kid for both gingerbread houses, as well as Gingerbread men. It has great flavor, is structurally sound and able to carry heavy loads of frosting and candy without collapsing for about 3 weeks. The dough is extremely sticky but delicate, so you must heavily flour your board, rolling pin and spatulas. It is imperative that parchment be used on the baking sheets. This is because the finished cookie is still soft when first out of the oven, if you attempt to move the large pieces they may break, so always leave the pieces to cool for 5 minutes on the baking sheet, without the parchment, the cookies will adhere to your sheet when cooling.
OK, after being on here so long, I finally found my templates after moving, so the dimensions are now posted in the recipe above/below. With these dimensions you will have enough dough from a batch to make 3 gingerbread houses, with some to spare for little mini gingerbread men or little ginger trees for you landscaping...
Ingredients You'll Need
1 Cup Butter for cookies or Crisco for a house (Crisco increases the structural integrity of the baked dough due to it's lower water content)
1 Cup Sugar
1 Egg
1 cup Molasses
2 TB Cider Vinegar
5 1/2 cups AP Flour
1 1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Kosher Salt
3 tsp Ginger
1 tsp Cinnamon
½ tsp Clove
Directions
In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
In a separate bowl, whisk flour, baking soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon and clove.
Add egg to the butter/sugar mixture and continue beating until homogenous.
Add molasses and Vinegar and mix well.
Slowly add the flour 3/4 cup at a time, mixing until completely incorporated before the next addition.
Chill dough for 2 hours
Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Roll out the dough to ¼ inch on a well floured board.
Cut out shapes with a floured cutter.
Move Gingerbread Men and/or Women to a parchment lined baking sheet with a well floured spatula.
Bake cookies for 8 minutes on regular baking sheets.
Bake cookies for 10 minutes if you are using the AirBake pans.
Bake for 10 – 12 minutes if you are making a gingerbread house.
(Dimensions of pieces to be posted at a later date---- I need to measure my templates)
