Gingerbread Blossoms Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What kind of molasses do you use for gingerbread cookies? ›

Medium Or Dark Molasses

“It adds enough bold flavor and sweet notes with a hint of bitterness to any recipe, which is exactly what you want for making gingerbread cookies.”

Divide the dough into two thick disks and wrap each disk in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until chilled, about 3 hours. (The dough can be prepared up to 2 days ahead.) To roll out the cookies, work with one disk at a time, keeping the other disk refrigerated.

“There are some gingerbread recipes that are hard right after baking and need to sit for a few days to soften. Molasses and honey hardens gingerbread, but as the sugar absorbs moisture, it will get softer.”

Gingerbread refers to a broad category of baked goods, typically flavored with ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon and sweetened with honey, sugar, or molasses. Gingerbread foods vary, ranging from a moist loaf cake to forms nearly as crisp as a ginger snap.

Molasses – Essential for that deep, rich, caramel-like gingerbread flavour! It also helps hold the dough's shape. Golden syrup makes a great sub, or treacle. Honey will also work, but the cookies will spread out a touch more and not have the same deep flavour (but still very, very good!).

After making the dough I ate a little bit of it and it tasted very strange. So I went on Google and it turns out you're not supposed to use blackstrap molasses in a recipe unless it specifically calls for it or else it will ruin the flavor.

To make sticky gingerbread dough easier to work with, chill it for at least 1 hour before rolling it out. Roll out the dough on a surface that's lightly dusted with flour or a mixture of flour and confectioners' sugar (aka powdered sugar).

Sure. You can make gingerbread that's sturdy enough to stand up and still tasty and tender. You usually need to roll it out thicker than you ordinarily would for cookies (as thick as your little finger?) but it is still good to eat.

If you try to roll out the dough right after removing it from the fridge, it will be too stiff to work with. Instead, take it out of the refrigerator and allow it to sit at room temperature for 5 to 10 minutes until it's warm enough to roll without tearing or cracking.

Doubling up on molasses softened the cookies significantly.

Molasses is also extremely dark in color, so this batch of cookies turned out to be a deep brown. While most of the batches came out hard and crunchy, this cookie was bendable toward the middle. It had slightly crunchy edges but was mostly soft.

What happens if you add too much butter to gingerbread cookies? ›

An excessive amount of butter makes it where the flour is unable to absorb the combined fat, which causes the cookie to spread too widely and the sugar to carbonize more easily because it's surrounded by too buttery a dough.

Golden Syrup

With its golden, amber color, it is lighter than molasses, though the two are similar in their thickness. Golden syrup also a liquid sweetener, so 1 cup of golden syrup can replace 1 cup of molasses. Golden syrup has a unique flavor, so it may alter the flavor of your recipe slightly.

According to Rhonda Massingham Hart's Making Gingerbread Houses, the first known recipe for gingerbread came from Greece in 2400 BC.

Timing is the key to achieving the crispy edges and chewy centers of a perfect gingerbread cookie. Due to gingerbread's dark color, it can be tricky to tell when they're done baking—look for puffed up, just-set centers. Gingerbread cookies will collapse as they cool, delivering that chewy cookie texture.

What Is the Best Type of Molasses for Cookies? There are three types of molasses, two of which are suitable for molasses cookies: light molasses and dark molasses. Choose dark molasses for a darker color and stronger molasses flavor, but if all you can find is light molasses, that will work, too.

The recipe is simple and straight forward, beginning with the usual steps of creaming butter and sugar. Fancy molasses is the lightest of the molasses varieties and adds the perfect amount of robust sweetness when paired with dark brown sugar.

Light molasses is the liquid that remains after the first white sugar is extracted from cane juice. The flavor is lighter and has more fruity notes to it, in the same way the first pressing of olives makes a lighter, fruitier olive oil. Light (sometimes called "fancy") molasses is ideal for baked goods and candies.

Dark Molasses

It's darker and thicker the light variety, with a deeper, richer flavor that hints at bitterness. It's not quite as sweet, but it's also not as bitter as blackstrap molasses. It's a good option for people looking for a sweetener with reduced sugar content, and it makes an incredible gingerbread.