4th Friern Barnet Guides do Random Bakes of Kindness Part 4

Barbara is a new Guide with us, one who throws herself into everything we do with gusto and enthusiasm, so her keenness for this Challenge wasn't unsurprising. She quite literally bounded into view, her hand waving in the air as I asked "So, who wants to do their Random Bake of kindness next week?"

Barbara chose Gingerbread easter bunnies - sometimes it's best not to question the thought process of your average 10 year old. And it's actually very seasonally appropriate taste-wise, if you ignore the Easter part of the equation. I think I might use this recipe again if we do Christmas bakes as part of our weekend away in December. I think these would make brilliant tree decorations, iced with white water icing and silver balls, and gingham ribbon through the top of star shapes. Plan!

Ingredients

250ml honey
250g soft brown sugar
150g softenend butter
100g ground almonds
400g plain flour
1 tsp cinammon
1/4tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground cardamom
1/4 tsp ground mixed spice
4 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp lemon zest, grated
1 egg
1tsp bicarbonate of soda
2tbsp water

Method

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C/ Gas mark 4

Heat the honey, sugar and butter in a pan on a low heat, stirring until the sugar has dissolved (we had adult supervision for this bit, obviously) Remove the pan from the heat and pour it into a bowl to cool
Add the ground almonds, flour, spices, lemon zest and egg to this bowl and mix well
Stir in the bicarb and knead with your hands until the dough is shiny and stops sticking to the bowl
Roll out the dough on a floured worktop to a thickness of about half a centimetre
Cut out your shapes, rerolling until you've finished the dough
Place on baking trays lined with parchment and and bake for 14-18 minutes
Remove from the oven carefully and cool on a wire rack

Decorate with water icing.

We found these spread more than we would have liked so if the girls decide they want to do a weekend of Christmas prep then I might do a trial run in the coming weeks mixing it up with my gingerbread recipe that I've used for Christmas Gingerbread Guides previously.

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.