Festive Gingerbread Men Recipe

As it’s Christmas, and I love baking, I thought I’d have a go at making some Gingerbread men this year! I found a really good recipe online, tweaked it to my liking, and came up with this!

You will need:
350g Plain Flour
1tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
2tsp Ground Ginger
1tsp Ground Cinnamon
125g Butter
175g Dark Brown Sugar
1 Medium Egg
4tbsp Golden Syrup

For the Royal Icing:
2 Egg Whites
2 Cups Icing Sugar
Food colouring (I prefer using gel as it doesn’t seem to affect the consistency of the icing)

Here’s how to make them!

1.   Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Line two trays with greaseproof paper and set aside

2.    Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and cinnamon until combined well. Add the butter and rub through the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add in the brown sugar and mix further.

Lightly beat the egg and golden syrup together, then slowly add to the dry mix until it starts to clump together.

3.   Tip the dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead until smooth. Wrap the dough in clingfilm and leave to chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.

4.   Take the dough out of the fridge and roll out to a 5mm thickness onto a lightly floured surface. Using cutters, cut out your gingerbread men shapes and place onto the baking trays, leaving enough space inbetween each one. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until lightly golden brown, then remove from the oven and leave on a wire rack to cool completely.

TIME TO DECORATE! 

You can use whatever you want to decorate these, but I wanted to go for a more traditional piped royal icing design.

For the royal icing, I combined 2 egg whites with 2 cups of icing sugar and whipped this mixture together until smooth and glossy.
I separated the mix into different colours, and used piping bags to pipe the icing carefully onto the gingerbread men and left them to dry completely. I find icing these with royal icing makes them much easier to package up without being ruined, if you’re making these as gifts (which I am!)

I really hope you enjoyed this post, if you want to watch the video of me making these, go check out my Youtube channel, where I have a few more Christmassy-themed videos!

Hey guys!

If you’re a subscriber to my Youtube channel, you may have noticed last week I posted a DIY Christmas wreath and garland video. I enjoyed making these so much that I decided to do a blog post on the DIYs too, so here it is!

I started with my supplies, most of them were conveniently from Wilkinsons in the UK, this place is surprisingly GREAT for crafting at Christmas so I highly suggest you take a trip there as everything is so affordable! I managed to pick up my rattan wreath from there for £5, and my luxurious 2m garland for £10 (quite a bargain in comparison to some other I’d seen around!)

Other supplies were priced as follows:
- 50 pack of berries for £1 
- 2 packs of 5 cinnamon sticks for £1 each 
- 3 berry stems for £1 each 
- A can of snow spray for around £1.70 (all from Wilkinsons but you can find all of this online) 
- 42 snow covered pinecones for £2.99 from B&M

I also had to purchase myself a glue gun which I found on Ebay for around £6, but you might already have one of these!

I roughly worked out where I wanted everything to go on my wreath, and used my glue gun to attach everything down when I was happy. I stuck down the larger items first, then used the smaller berries to cover up any obvious patches of glue. 
When I was happy with everything, I sprayed the snow spray lightly over the majority of the wreath. I then coated the entire thing with a light spray of clear lacquer to keep the snow spray in place!


When making the garland, I decided to use the snow spray first to cover the entire length in a layer of snow before adding the decorative bits. I then sealed the snow spray with clear lacquer. 
I pulled apart the berry stems so I had more to work with, and distributed these evenly along the garland. I placed the pinecones and cinnamon sticks evenly along the garland, then stuck them all in place with hot glue. 
I used the burlap ribbon that was originally wrapped around the garland to make hanging loops to hang onto my fireplace, and then as an added touch, I hung some IKEA fairly lights along the garland.

If you’re interested in watching me make both of these, go check out my Youtube channel for the video!