The best gingerbread biscuits you'll ever have!

Every Christmas I make these gorgeous, tasty Scandinavian gingerbread biscuits. They are so much better than shop-bought ones, and as an added bonus, baking them makes your whole house smell like Christmas. This is quite an easy recipe, but somewhat time-consuming, as you need to make the dough a day before baking.  The recipe is originally Finnish so a little bit different from the Swedish gingerbread biscuits.

Ingredients:

250g butter

200ml sugar

150ml golden syrup

1.5tsp ground cinnamon

1.5tsp ground cardamom

1tsp ground cloves

1tsp ground ginger

2 eggs

1tsp salt

2tsp bicarbonate soda

900ml flour

Method:

Pop the butter, sugar, golden syrup, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and ginger on a pan, and heat until butter and sugar is melted and mix all together. Mix frequently to avoid burning. Bring the mixture to boil and take off heat. 

Let the mixture cool, at least an hour. When the mixture is cool enough, whisk the eggs and mix in the spice mixture. Combine salt, bicarbonate soda and flour, and mix in the spice mixture. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and refrigerate 24 hours. You can also freeze the dough for up to a month. 

Take the dough out about half an hour before starting to make the biscuits to let it warm a bit. Roll it to a few millimeter thick - not too thin though as it becomes difficult to handle. Keep on popping the dough in the fridge or freezer when it gets too sticky and soft to use. I also like to use plenty of flour as it does get quite sticky.

Bake for 6-10 minutes in 200 °C (180 °C for fan ovens). I baked these large gingerbread men for 8 minutes, and that was just about right. 

Ground cardamom can be a bit tricky to find from your average supermarkets - you can get it from well-stocked Indian supermarkets, possibly from health-food stores, most definitely online, but failing that, I have also ground my own from cardamom pods in the past.

And forget the sweet toppings, piping intricate icing sugar decorations to make these biscuits Pinterest perfect. Gingerbread biscuits are best with cheese - blue cheese is suberb on these. I love a slab of creamy blue cheese, something like Castello on these biscuits. A match made in heaven in my opinion. We quite often make a big batch of these biscuits for Christmas and gift them with a bit of port and stilton, for that adults-only Christmas Eve midnight snacking...  

Are you making your own gingerbread for Christmas?

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