Gingerbread Christmas Present Boxes

My lovely lil sister, Mrs Killer, would be rather devastated if I didn't make gingerbread for Christmas... I usually make gingerbread men but this year, I came across these gingerbread boxes in one of the free Coles recipe catalogues that I'll pick up every season for dessert inspiration.

I originally had grand plans of making everyone a decent sized present box each, say, around 7cm square... but after the first batch of gingerbread only yielded 3 boxes I re-evaluated... everyone got a little gingerbread box each instead! When I thought more about it anyway, I realised that people probably don't want THAT much gingerbread in one hit anyway, so a small box was a much better way to go. (And it meant much less work for me as well!)

One batch should make about 7 boxes (based on a 3 x 3 cm square box)

Ingredients:
Gingerbread:
 - 125 g butter
 - 1/3 cup sugar
 - 1/3 cup golden syrup
 - 3 cups flour
 - 1/2 tsp ground ginger
 - 1 tsp cinnamon
 - 3 tsp bicarbonate of soda
 - 1 egg
 - 2 tsp vanilla essence

Icing & Decorations:
 - 1 x paper square template to your desired size (I used a 3 x 3 cm template)
 - icing sugar
 - a couple tablespoons of butter
 - a couple tablespoons of milk
 - Christmas themed chocolates (Optional)

Method:
Step 1: Preheat oven to moderate (around 180degrees Celcius)

Step 2: Put butter, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring occassionally, until butter melts. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

Step 3: Sift flour, ginger and cinnamon together into a large bowl.

Step 4: Add sifted bicarbonate of soda to the cooled butter mixture and pour onto flour mixture.

Step 5: Add egg and vanilla and mix to a soft dough.

Step 6: Roll the dough out to a thickness of about 5mm.

Step 7: This is where you'll need your template and a long knife of some kind. Cut the dough into strips the using your template as a guide for spacing.

Step 8: Cut the strips into squares using your template as a guide for sizing. Repeat steps 5, 6, 7 until you run out of dough or have enough squares**.

**Note: You need 6 squares to make one box, so make sure your total number of squares is a factor of 6 (e.g. 6, 12, 18, 24 etc)

Step 9: Place squares onto baking trays and bake for around 10 minutes (keep an eye on them as it may be a little more or a little less depending on your oven). Remove and let cool on a wire rack.

Step 10: To construct the boxes, cream 1 tbs of the butter with 1 cup of the icing sugar. Add small amount of milk if needed. Add more icing sugar and milk as needed to get the right consistency - the mix has to be firm enough to stay where you want it rather than drip off the gingerbread pieces.

Step 11: Use a piping bag to pipe a strip of icing onto the edge of a gingerbread square and quickly push the edge of another square against it. Repeat this with each edge until you have a box with 5 sides.

Step 12: As these were Christmas present boxes, at this point I put Christmas themed chocolates into each box and then sealed the top. I also had 3 large boxes for the kiddies (these were my boxes before I decreased the size of the template...) and it was at this point that I piped their names onto the outside and decorated them with Smarties.

Step 13: Put the lids onto the boxes using the same method as Step 11. I then stuck a chocolate star on the lids as some basic decoration for the non-kiddie gingerbread present boxes.