Apologies and a New Start

Hiya all!!

First things first, apologies to all for not being around for around 3 weeks (if not more!!) oops! I've been so busy with sixth form and have not really done any baking apart from last weekend when I made gingerbread biscuits with my nephew.

I'll let you know how I made the biscuits but I thought I'd get things straight and clear things up firstly and call this a fresh start, from now on I will upload every Sunday afternoon with something I have baked or what I wish to bake near Christmas time as yes it is the lead up to Christmas officially now that Halloween is out of the way!! I will also show you some Christmas baked gifts I have been thinking of doing for friends and some family and how I will be packaging them and giving them as nice little home baked gifts.

Ok, that's out the way so now onto the way I made some gingerbread biscuits (which by the way were so lovely) with my nephew, however he didn't really help other than cutting out the biscuits which was what he only really wanted to do! These biscuits had a strange texture for a gingerbread biscuit than what you would normally assume as they had a shortbread texture with the gingerbread taste (I know sounds strange but worked incredibly well!).

The Ingredients:

350g/12oz plain flour, plus extra for rolling out
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
125g/4½oz butter
175g/6oz light soft brown sugar
1 free-range egg
4 tbsp golden syrup

The Method:

1. Sift together all the dry ingredients and pour into the bowl of a food processor. Add the butter and blend until it looks like breadcrumbs. Then stir in the sugar. 
2. Lightly beat the egg and golden syrup together, add to the food processor and pulse until it all clumps together. Tip the dough out, knead briefly until smooth, wrap in clingfim and leave to chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.
3. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper. 
4. Roll the dough out to a 0.5cm/¼in thickness on a lightly floured surface. Using cutters, cut out the gingerbread men shapes or when I did it I just used all different shapes that I had in cookie cutters (I used stars, hearts and gingerbread men) and place on the baking tray, leaving a gap between them as they spread a little bit. 
5. Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until lightly golden-brown. The original recipe says to leave on the tray once removed from the oven for around 10 minutes but I left them around 3 minutes and then moved them to a wire rack to finish cooling. When cooled decorate with whatever you want, I used icing sugar and water with different food colourings and also a few chocolate beans (as they were called but in short they were a cheap version of smarties!!).
   
   
   (I would have put a photo here, however I forgot to take photos of them!! Annoying, but no doubt I'll be doing them again so will hopefully take photos then.... if I remember!)

• Hope you enjoyed this post and, if you love Christmas as much as I do, you feel a little bit more Christmassy and hopefully will try these biscuits on your lead up to Christmas. Honestly they didn't take more than an hour to make and bake, the longest part was decorating but that doesn't have to take long if you don't want it too! My next post will be up next Sunday (9/11/14) because this Sunday I will be busy finishing work for school after this half term and getting things ready to go back on Monday! Hope you've enjoyed this read and will continue reading my upcoming posts as they will be more regular and hopefully will become a bit better with more exciting bakes that hopefully work well and maybe you can even try them out yourselves!
  
  
  Thanks for reading!
  Caitlin xxx