Gingerbread with icing from Elena

Greetings my friends!

Today I will allow myself to move away from established traditions and give way to the blog reader and heroine mother)) Elena.

Lena paints gingerbread perfectly and she even managed to surprise me with such a concept as “mosaic gingerbread”.

Lena decided to kindly give us her iced gingerbread cookies. More precisely, not the gingerbreads themselves, but the recipe for their preparation. Personally, he reminded me of cooking honey cakes. I'm sure it tastes the same.

I give Lena the floor and I hope her recipe will be useful to you. I will definitely use it too!

The very basis of the recipe was found on the Internet, but in the course of working with the dough I changed it, so it seems to be a little bit mine)

Ingredients:

• butter or margarine - 200 gr.
• sugar - 150-200 gr.
• honey - 150 gr.
• ginger, ground - 2 tsp
• cloves, ground - on the tip of a knife
• cinnamon - 1 tsp
• cardamom - ½ tsp
• coriander - ½ tsp
• nutmeg - 1 pinch
• salt - 1 pinch
• soda - ½ tsp
• yolks - 4 pcs.
• rye flour - 200 gr.
• wheat flour - 300 gr.

Cooking:

1. Melt butter or good margarine with sugar and honey, sugar should dissolve, do not boil!
2. Remove from heat and add ground ginger, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and coriander, a pinch of nutmeg and salt.
   

   Spices can be to your taste, but cinnamon and ginger are required. Next, you can add either orange zest or orange extract. I add the extract, otherwise the zest interferes with painting the gingerbread, but it tastes better with zest.

3. In this oil-honey mixture, add half a teaspoon of soda (!), Mix, it will begin to be extinguished due to honey.
4. Next, we introduce 4 yolks into the cooled mixture, mix, add rye flour, mix and add premium wheat flour, although the first grade is also good.
5. I stir all the time with a spoon, at first glance it may seem that it is liquid, you do not need to add flour, a maximum of 50 grams.
6. Now all this is in a bag and in the refrigerator for at least a day! The coolest gingerbread dough 5 days of rest. But it lies quietly for a month.
7. On the day of baking, we take out the dough and let it warm up, knead it well and roll it out 3-5 mm thick, literally dusting the dough a little, I almost don’t dust it.
8. We cut out the figures with a mold or a knife, bake on parchment 180-200ºС for about 10-15 minutes, until golden, but be guided by your oven.
9. As they pulled it out, immediately put it directly on the parchment on a flat surface and press the gingerbread with a board for 8-10 seconds, do not press hard), when baking, the dough may rise or go in bubbles, so we press it so that the surface for painting is even.

We schedule for 3-4 days sugar icing. I love making it sour.

1. Beat the protein at low speed, gradually add powdered sugar and from one or two pinches to one teaspoon of citric acid (powder), here to taste.
2. We add the powder until the mass becomes white, elastic and the peak hangs a little when the whisk is removed, at the end of the kneading we add lemon juice: 3 drops of lemon juice for 1 protein.
   

   We need such a consistency to draw small details and a contour, and if necessary, let's say the whole gingerbread is filled with icing, then we outline the contour of this consistency with icing, and for filling we take this icing and dilute it with a little water or protein (i.e. we make a ten-second icing, such a gingerbread concept) until, when drawing a groove with a spoon, it closes in 10-11 seconds, while the icing must be kneaded very well.

3. We fill the gingerbread, take an awl or a toothpick and, as it were, level the surface so that it is even, along the way, we burst the bubbles that form, otherwise, when it hardens, the surface will be uneven, in craters.
   

   And yet, it’s better to pack the icing right away as needed: for example, I need 3 colors, I take a little bit from the main one, first into a confectionery bag (you can put it in a freezer bag), paint it with dye, put it aside for the contour, and dilute the rest and also in plastic bag. While painting the icing, be sure to cover with a towel soaked in cold water and wrung out. Otherwise, crystals will form and it is inconvenient to draw.

There will be questions, I will answer.

I want to say that children really like these gingerbread cookies (and I have four of them :)) I make themed for any holiday: New Year, St. Valentine, etc.

Stored in a package (I pack it in a baking sleeve) half a year is 100 percent, although somehow they forgot a couple of pieces on the shelf for a year, I tried it out of curiosity, very tasty.

And what is the aroma when you bake them ...