Buckingham Palace Gingerbread Cookies

Photo: Royal/UK

There are Christmas cookies I make every year. Gingerbread cookies are not one of them. Often we bought Lebkuchen dipped in dark chocolate from a German bakery, so there was no need to make gingerbread cookies. Our confections tended to be cookies we could make better ourselves at home. But I do like to try new recipes. A British Facebook friend gave me this Christmas cookie recipe, and they are very simple to bake:

Buckingham Palace Gingerbread Cookies

Ingredients:

7 - 8 cups self raising flour (I will substitute 7 - 8 cups of all-purpose flour, adding 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon salt because I do not buy self-rising flour.)
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon mixed spice (includes cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice)

Photo: McCormick

1/2 cup unsalted butter
2/3 cup soft dark brown sugar
2 tablespoon granulated sugar for dusting
3/8 cup milk (= 6 tablespoons)

Directions: 

1) Add the ingredients, one-by-one, to a mixing bowl and incorporate.

2) Chill the dough in the refrigerator for up to 1/2 hour.

3) With a rolling pin, roll out the dough flat. Eyeball it, not too thick or thin. 

4) With cookie cutters, cut your dough into shapes. Dusk with a little sugar.

5) Bake at 350 degrees F for 10-12 minutes. Let cool.

Royal Icing to decorate the cookies:

Wilton.com

Ingredients: 

2 pasteurized egg whites
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups powdered sugar

Optional: Food coloring of your choice; or leave the frosting white

I had to add 3 large eggs and extra milk to get the dough to stick together and to be able to roll it out and cookie cut it into shapes. The original recipe produced a too dry dough which didn’t incorporate all the flour. If you follow suite, do so one egg and a little milk at a time. I also suggest doubling or tripling the spices, especially the ginger and cinnamon. Normally I cut the sugar by 1/4 cup in desserts, but here I’d increase the sugar by 1/4 cup. So now you have the Buckingham Palace original recipe, as well as, my tweaks. 

Directions:

Mix and decorate your gingerbread cookies however you like. If you don't have a special icing tool, cut one corner off of a plastic sandwich bag to fill and squirt out the icing to decorate. The cookies that look like the work of a first grader, get eaten quickly!

As readers are aware, not only do I feature recipes in order to share them, but so I can return here to remember how to make them again!  Lately cooking and baking requires grabbing an iPad. Oh, what a digital age we live in!

For very busy people, Voorman is a small cookie company on the East coast. Their cookies are nearly as good as homemade and available at Rite-Aid and Target for about $3 for a 14 ounce bag. There is no shame in buying a bag!

Enjoy!


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