Gingerbread Guides

Christmas is nearly upon us, and albeit rather late for me, I'm feeling appropriately festive; cards have been written, secret santa gifts given and received, and I've been running around trying to get everything I need to done. One of those need to's was to make the Guides part of their Christmas presents and our Unit's leadership team decided on Gingerbread Guides.

We used a simple recipe, that the girls actually made up themselves when we ran the Sunflower Cafe in the summer. Lynsey and I pottered around the kitchen, giggling as we tried to measure out 4 tablespoons of golden syrup (I know to use boiling water to make this easier, so I have no idea why it is that I forget at key moments) and making a huge mess of the initial icing. However, in the end we managed to make enough of our Gingerbread Guides for each of the girls to have one (with some spares).

The recipe we used was the following, which we amended by adding 2 tablespoons of milk as the dough didn't come together enough for us to roll out. If you try it, just see how it goes and add the milk if you feel it needs it.

12 oz plain flour

1 tsp Bicarbonate of soda

2.5 tsps ground ginger

4oz unsalted butter

6oz light brown soft sugar

1 egg beaten

4 tblsps golden syrup

(and we added 2 tblsps semi-skimmed milk)

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees

Sift the four, bicarb and ginger together in a mixing bowl.

Chop the butter into small pieces and rub into the dry mixture until the consistency of fine breadcrumbs then mix in teh sugar

Add the beaten egg and syrup mixture and mix together to form a dough (this is where we added the milk)

Roll out onto a floured surface to about 5mm thick then cut out your gingerbread men (or Guides!) shapes. Put these on a lined baking sheet and cook for 10 - 15 minutes (I found they were easily done at 10 minutes but I have a fan oven) - just touch the biscuit with a tip of your finger and if it's not squishy (technical term there) it's done.

Leave on the baking sheet for a couple of minutes and transfer (we used a fish slice) to a cooking rack and leave to cool.

Then decorate - as you can see we had a whole lot of fun with this.