Christmas gifts: gingerbread "stained glass" cookies

For the past few years I have made some little gifts for Sophie to give to her school friends (see last year's marshmallow snowmen and 2011's reindeer noses).

This year, time has been limited so I decided that Sophie and Justin could help me make gingerbread window cookies. This is something I did a very long time ago with the guides and I still think they are very pretty and surprisingly simple.

I made some gingerbread dough and chilled it until the kids came home from school. Then they rolled and cut out lots of cookies, in christmas tree, snowflake and holly leaf shapes, The christmas tree cutter was one I already had for making window cookies and is designed to cut the big and little tree in one go but the snowflake and holly leaf cutters are solid and so we cut a small flower from the middle of each cookie.

I bought some Foxes Glacier fruit sweets and then popped similar colours into freezer bags and bashed them to bits. It is okay to have a few lumps in it still. A word of warning on this bit though - make sure you have an old chopping board or similar underneath. And use a hammer! My kitchen table now has a multitude of little dents from these very solid sweets, as does our kiddies wooden rolling pin!

I then sprinkled the crushed sweets into the hole in the middle of each cookie, mixing some of the colours for a really pretty effect. The gingerbread was then cooked for about 12 minutes and hey presto, out came some beautiful "stained glass" christmas cookies.

This is the recipe I used for the gingerbread:

Gingerbread "stained glass" cookies

350g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
125g butter
175g light soft brown sugar
1 free-range egg
4 tbsp golden syrup

Coloured boiled sweets (such as Foxes Glacier Fruits) - crushed into small pieces

Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and cinnamon and pour into the bowl of a food processor. Add the butter and blend until the mix looks like breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar.

Lightly beat the egg and golden syrup together, add to the food processor and pulse until the mixture clumps together. (I had trouble with the dough coming together here so I tipped it out into a bigger bowl and mixed together by hand which took a good 5 minutes). Tip the dough out, knead briefly until smooth, wrap in clingfim and leave to chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.

Preheat the oven to Gas mark 4.5 or 180C. Grease the baking tray thoroughly (this is important as I forgot to do this and one set of cookies stuck to the tray - there was no way to get the stained glass bit off the tray!)

Roll the dough out to a 0.5cm/¼in thickness on a lightly floured surface. Using cutters, cut out the shapes you want, including the hole in the middle and place on the baking tray, leaving a gap between them. Make sure the hole is a good size as this shrinks when the gingerbread bakes.

If you would like to use these as hanging decorations, make a small hole in one end of the cookie before baking. You should then be able to thread a piece of ribbon through once it is cooked.

Carefully sprinkle the crushed sweets into the holes in the middles of the gingerbread cookies. You can be creative and mix the colours, as you can see I did with the christmas tree and the snowflake.

Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until lightly golden-brown. Leave on the tray for 10 minutes and then move to a wire rack to finish cooling. It is helpful to flex the baking tray or sheet a little to "pop" the gingerbread cookies off.

© 2013 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.

A bit of a Star Wars theme going on ...

There is a price to pay for living with a Star Wars mad 40 something year old: I receive e-mails throughout the year with photos of amazing Star Wars birthday cakes and the related anticipation of one such masterpiece appearing for his birthday. In previous years I have managed to "ignore" the constant trickle of hints but this year I was asked specifically to create a Star Wars cake.

The brief: just a simple Star Wars recreation of the battle of Hoth, complete with power generator and an AT-AT walker. Oh, and it should include Jelly-Belly jelly beans!! So nothing too complicated then? And all this with a week to do it ...

First step - scour the web for images for inspiration. Interestingly very few were stills from the film which surprised me, and most were other peoples' physical recreations of the battle scene (I should be thankful that my other half is not quite as nerdy as those people) which wasn't very helpful for my need to be as accurate as my skills allow (now who's the nerd?). I did find some useful images which helped formulate the design and off I went.

I made a 9" gluten free vanilla sponge and filled and coated with a lime and desiccated coconut buttercream (a flavour experiment which worked very well). I then covered the cake and board in one go with white fondant. Next step was to create the snowy crevasses, then make the power generator. I cut eight large thick circles in grey fondant, used a smaller circle cutter to mark the inner circle and added lots of texture before sandwiching them together into 4 pairs. I used two pieces of spaghetti to stand each circle upright and then pushed a long piece of spaghetti through the middle of the circles and cylinders of fondant between each circle. I finished off the power generator with some grey supports.

A standing AT-AT walker was not going to be possible in the timescale, as I would have had to make it in sections and let each section dry before putting it all together; so I opted for the fallen one which I think came out well. I also added a gun turret positioned in the snowy crevasses.

As I mentioned earlier, the brief included Jelly-Belly jelly beans and as I had't included these in the sponge itself I had to find a way to include them in the decoration. I decided to use white ones (incidentally these are coconut so fitted very well with the flavour of the buttercream!) and turn them into Rebel Alliance fighters. Smiley faces drawn with an edible ink pen, brown hats, snow goggles and a black gun and my guys were in place. Mr "I want a storm trooper and some more realistic (like in the film) people" didn't seem that impressed but they made me smile every time I looked at them so they were staying!

The finishing touches of his name in Star Wars writing (template created on the computer, printed, cut out and placed on grey fondant which I then cut to shape) and some edible snow like sprinkles and glitter and the cake was finished ...

As it was also Star Wars day recently (May the fourth be with you) and we had a packet of gingerbread dough in the fridge that the kiddies had persuaded Daddy to buy for them, we decided to use the fantastic Star Wars cookie cutters that we bought last year on our holiday in Florida.

I helped them roll the dough out and they both picked two cutters each and cut and plunged Yoda, Darth Vader, Boba Fett and a stormtrooper.

The baked gingerbread cookies came out very well and they enjoyed eating them. Perhaps another time (when they are a bit older) we might also have a go at icing them ...

© 2012 Nicola Noble: Please observe the rules of copyright and blog etiquette. If you use my ideas or images, please link back to my blog. And do let me know - I'd love to take a look.

This year's Christmas cake - 2011

I have just finished decorating my Christmas cake and overall I am quite pleased with the finished look.

I bought a ready made un-iced fruit cake from M&S and then had to remind myself what I had been taught on my cake decorating course last year about covering with marzipan and icing. I think I got it right: I filled the imperfections/dents in the cake with small balls of marzipan then made apricot glaze which I spread onto the cake before covering with a thin layer of marzipan; I then rubbed some vodka over the marzipan before topping with white fondant icing. I left it for a week for the fondant to harden slightly and the cake was then ready to decorate.

I had decided some time ago that I wanted to do something with gingerbread men. When it came down to it I just couldn't get inspired but I trawled the net and pinned them all to a board on Pinterest and ultimately found a greetings card that I liked the look of.

The next thing to sort was the gingham. There is a group on Facebook (Fans of Cake Baker) which contains the most helpful cakey people and I asked them for advice. Within about five minutes of posting my question, I had a selection of helpful responses, of which one was buying a cake topper sheet of fondant with red gingham printed on in edible inks. This arrived within two days of ordering and I then set to putting the design together.

I cut a square of the gingham and attached it to the cake with water. My gingerbread man cutter turned out to be too small so I printed out an image I liked, cut out the template and cut around that onto the gingerbread coloured fondant (made from chestnut brown and yellow colouring). I then made some red buttons with my button mould and cut some stars out in the gingerbread coloured fondant and attached these around the cake alternating with some gingham stars. I created the gingham ones by sticking the gingham topper to a thin roll of white fondant and cutting the stars from this. I was using a plastic cutter so the shape was not as clean as I would have liked but I think it would work better with a metal cutter.

I had to stop at this point and although I was pleased with how it was coming together, I really felt that it wasn't looking very Christmassy.

Thankfully, my lovely sister-in-law suggested that I put a santa hat on the gingerbread man and that finally gave me the inspiration I was looking for. I added some ric-rac on the legs and arms and a holly decoration (not edible) on the hat. 

I finished off with some pearl lustre spray. It was my first time using this in an aerosol form and I went a bit mad and also held it a bit close in some places so it pooled and left tide marks. It also gave the white fondant an antique feel which sort of works for this design. 

The sad thing now is that I promised my sister that she could have half the cake for her Christmas celebrations - but where do I cut it? Think she can have the legs!

Merry Christmas everyone - I hope that you all have a fun holiday period full of yummy food.

© 2011 Nicola Noble