BLOGMAS DAY 8: CHRISTMAS COOKIE CHAOS

Oh my goodness I’ve been so excited for this post. Welcome to Blogmas day 8! Ever since Helen moved to Coogee we’ve been saying we’re going to take full advantage of the oven and cook some festive treats. Trying to find a day where we’re both off work has been a little hard but we found the time and I’ve been so excited to finally bake and make this post. We got the recipe from food.com but I’ll note down the recipe and instructions anyway because it was so fun to do and we hit a few bumps along the way. This recipe was for gluten-free gingerbread cookies as Helen is Coeliac, check out her blog here as she’s written a post about her experience with it and our cookie making skills.

Ingredients:
2 cups gluten-free flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoon ground ginger
1 pinch of salt (we forgot to put this in)
1 egg
125g butter
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/2 cup brown sugar
Icing sugar
Red food dye

So we whisked together the butter and brown sugar, which was so messy because the butter wasn’t that soft, even after placing it in the pre-heated oven (170 degrees Celsius) for a few minutes. After whisking in the golden syrup and egg we added all the dry ingredients and mixed them in gradually until we had quite a thick dough. A quick lick of the spoon and it was ready to be covered and refrigerated. Depending on the temperature of your fridge I’d recommend varying the length of time you keep it in there for. The instructions say 1 hour but when we took it out and tried to knead it it was still very wet in the centre. This might have been due to the amount of flour we put in the mix but we stuck to the recipe so maybe not.

This is where the chaotic part came into play. First off we didn’t have a rolling pin so we had to cover a glass in flour and just go with it, then we discovered how sticky and wet the dough was when we tried to cut shapes into it because we didn’t have any shape cutters either. It got EVERYWHERE.

So ditching our original plan of cutting them into candy cane and snowflake shapes (we were just going to draw shapes onto paper, cut them out then slice around them), we just rolled the dough into small to medium sized balls, placed them into the cake tin and flattened them into circles from there. This turned out to be so much easier than cutting into the sticky batter but although the recipe said it made 30 we only got 12. We probably could have stretched it to 16 if we didn’t rinse away all the batter that got stuck to our hands and chopping board.

The oven was already heated at 170 and the instructions recommend around 15 minutes. The cookies rose a significant amount so they turned out a bit thicker than expected and a few stuck together. They took around 20 minutes to bake, give or take a few minutes, as we took out the top tray first and let the bottom tray bake for a tad longer. Waiting for them to cool was so tedious because all we wanted to do was get stuck into icing and decorating them. Once they had cooled down enough we made up two bowls of icing sugar; one red, one white.

Because there were 12 we decided to just decorate 6 each whatever way we wanted. A really good idea we had for this was to create little makeshift piping bags from sandwich bags, so we poured the icing into separate pouches, squeeze them into on corner and cut a tiny bit of the corner off. This turned out to be a lot easier and more efficient than spreading it with a knife or pouring it on with a spoon as it made the icing flat and even and it allowed us to decorate them with patterns. And voila! The finished product:

Granted our icing skills may need a little work but they tasted delicious. I’m so pleased with how these turned out and even though they’re still really sugary they’re a tad healthier than normal because they’re gluten-free. We’re planning on making a festive cake a few days before Christmas, so keep your eyes peeled for that post nearer to the 25th. After the clean up was done and the icing had dried we enjoyed them with a nice cup of tea in the sun.