Finnish Gingerbread for Christmas

To be honest, I don't know if there are big differences with gingerbreads. Sometimes there are big differences in things baked or cooked in different countries, even though they would basically be the same. Sometimes it's almost 100% the same, but it's rare, especially as every culture seems to have multiple ways to do one thing.

But I'll show you my way:

Ingredients:
125 grams of butter
1 deciliter of butter
3/4 deciliters of syrup
1,5 teaspoons of cinnamon
1 teaspoon of ginger
1 teaspoon of cardamom
0,5 teaspoon of clove
1 egg
4,5 deciliters of wheat flour
1 teaspoon of soda

Some enjoy adding a bit of bitter lemon peel in it too, so you could add one teaspoon of it if you'd like.

Start by adding butter, sugar, syrup and the spices in a small kettle and turn it on.

Heat it up until the butter and sugar have melted and you can mix it all well together. It's good to mix it a bit to ensure you don't burn anything.

When everything has melted, lift it off the stove and let it cool down.

Mix the flour together with the soda. This is to ensure the soda is evenly mixed with the flour instead of all the soda ending up in one place in the dough.

When the butter-sugar-spices -mix has cooled down enough, it's time to continue:

1. add the egg and mix
2. add the flours and mix

Avoid excessive mixing, as we're not trying to bake bread but make gingerbread.

When it's all mixed together, you should have a beautiful, light brown dough.

If you used a teflon kettle or similar, I recommend switchin the dough to another container, as teflon (and similar) lasts longer if you don't store food in them.

Leave the dough to a fridge for at least 6-8 hours to cool off.

After the hours of wait, remove the dough from the container. This might be difficult as the dough isn't soft anymore, but really stiff.

I recommend putting the dough to a table which is lightly covered with flours to ensure the dough will not stick to the table.

You can use a rolling pin to spread out the dough. We're aiming for approx. 3-5 mm thickness, as too thin gingerbreads will burn in the oven and too thick ones will remain quite soft.

The dough which previously seemed small turns out to be quite large, even though my assistant baker started to cut cookies before I was completely finished.

We have different kinds of gingerbread cutters and they can be used to make a ton of beautifully shaped gingerbreads.

The more delicate details the cookie cutter makes, the easier they can burn in the oven, so simple forms can be the easiest.

While you're still baking, heat up the oven to 200 °C

Once you've managed to cut out as many cookies you can, you can start collecting up the remaining pieces of dough into a ball, which can then be used again to make more gingerbread.

As you've collected the remaining pieces of dough, pick up a the rolling pin again and make one again.

This can be repeated as long as you have any dough left. The remaining dough can be eaten used as it is.

The oven should be at 200 °C at this point, so you can add the happy gingerbreads to a baking tray and add them in oven.

With my recipe, I managed to get 3 trays full of gingerbread.

One tray of gingerbread takes usually 5-7 minutes to be ready. You should be able to guard your oven and gingerbread, as they can easily burn. I think they're at their best when their corners start to get a little bit brown.

I love gingerbread as it is. Some put icing on them as decoration or to give a bit of extra sweetness to them, but you can also eat gingerbread with blue cheese and grapes. Gingerbread and blue cheese is an all time favorite in Finland, but kids usually love the sweet gingerbread without any kind of cheese.