Hi, I am Nicole Ferrigno. I am here today with Lizzie Evaline. We are with Paisley Fig Pastry and today, we are showing you how to make holiday cookies. Next, we are going to show you how to make gingerbread snowflakes. So, we will start with one stick of unsalted softened butter with half a cup of packed dark brown sugar. You are going to want to cream that for a couple of minutes till the mixture is nice and fluffy and we are going to stop the mixture and scrape the bowl down a number of times as needed to make sure that all the ingredients are incorporated.

What we will add next is one large egg and you want to turn the speed up of the mixture just a bit to get the egg incorporated. Again, with the addition of each new ingredient it s a good time to stop the mixer and scrape the bowl down. What you are going to add next is one half a cup of dark Black Strap molasses. So, the combination of molasses and the dark brown sugar is really what gives gingerbread its rich deep color.

You are going to want to make the mix for up to a minute or two as long as it takes to get all of the ingredients fully mixed. Some cookie doughs do require a lot of mixing because the may need aeration. In the case of rolled cookies you really do not need to incorporate a lot of air into the batter because you want them to bake flat. So, now we are ready to add our dry ingredients. What we have got in our bowl here are three cups of all purpose flour, one half teaspoon of baking soda, one quarter teaspoon of baking powder and then I have got a combination of spices, two teaspoons of ginger, two teaspoons of cinnamon, three quarters of a teaspoon of clove, half a teaspoon of black pepper and three quarters of a teaspoon of salt.

If you like an extra gingery, gingerbread cookie, you certainly could use fresh ginger in place of the ground ginger. We are mixing on low speed so as not to overwork the dough and we are going to mix just as long as it takes to get those dry ingredients incorporated. You will see it all start to gather into a bowl and Lizzie is scraping the bowl down quite a bit. You really have to be careful with all that molasses and all the spices. You want everything mixed really well.

You see that nice, deep, rich brown color, that s so characteristic of gingerbread and if you were here, you could smell it, you can smell a molasses and the ginger, it's really nice, very festive. So, now we are going to go ahead and pack the gingerbread dough into a large sheet of plastic wrap and press it flat into a disk, get it chilled down, looks great.

Alright, thank you Lizzie and we are going to go ahead and get that into the fridge, chill it for about an hour till it s nice and firm. So, we are going to go ahead and get the gingerbread dough into the fridge for about an hour so it chills nice and firm and when we come back, we are going to shape and bake the cookies.