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 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.
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