Fairy tales provide a rich source of inspiration for toddler activities. So I decided to incorporate ‘The Gingerbread Man’ story in with baking, as I know how much he loves cooking (however I think a lot of the time he just likes eating the ingredients, while weighing it out! Lol!)
Jacob knows a little bit about the story but, at this age, he enjoys repetition of stories as well as being able to help with ‘reading’ “Run, run as fast as you can, You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!”
This is our recipe.
Ingredients:
-
350g plain flour – sieved
- 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 2 tsp ground ginger
- 1 tsp ground cinnamon
- 125g butter or spread suitable for baking
- 175g soft brown sugar
- 1 medium sized egg
- 4 tbsp golden syrup
- a few currants for eyes (optional)
You will also need:
-
2 baking trays lined with greaseproof paper
- Gingerbread Men cutters (I bought the Gingerbread family from Sainsbury’s)
- Decorations e.g. glacé cherries, icing pen or icing sugar, small decorations
Method
- Preheat the oven to 180°C/ 350°F / Gas
- Mix the first 5 ingredients in a food processor or by hand until they look like breadcrumbs. Then stir in the sugar.
- Combine the egg and syrup and add to the mixture. Pulse or stir until everything combined.
- Knead until smooth, wrap in Clingfilm and chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.
- On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough to 0.5 cm thickness.
- Cut out the Gingerbread Men and place on the baking trays, leaving space between them as they will expand.
- If desired, add currants for eyes.
- Bake for 12-15 minutes or until light golden brown.
- Leave on the tray for 10 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
- Now comes the fun part, decorating your gingerbread men. We used small slices of glace cherries, hundreds and thousands, and tiny sugar stars. (however you can use whatever yummy treats you have handy) We found that dabbing small blobs of icing sugar onto the gingerbread men first helped the decorations stick.
We had lots of fun making our yummy gingerbread men. We had a Mummy, Daddy and baby gingerbread man, so Jacob could take these back for his Mummy and Daddy. However Mummy gingerbread man never made it back home, as Jacob ended up eating it! Oh well, the biscuits were tasty.
Love Chamomile Baby x x
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