Holiday Recipes - Baking and Frosting Gingerbread Cookies

Nichole Ferrigno: Hi, I am Nichole Ferrigno. I am here today with Lizzy Evelyn. We are with Paisley Fig Pastries. Today, we are showing you how to make holiday cookies. Next, we are going to show you how to roll, bake and decorate our Gingerbread Snowflake Cookies. So, we have made our gingerbread dough and chilled it in a fridge for just about an hour until it is nice and firm. Pulled it out of the fridge and we are going to roll it out on a lightly floured surface. A granite or marble kind of top is really nice and you can see if it is starting to stick just add a little extra flour, move your dough around that is always important too.

Move the dough as you roll, you are rolling for the center out to get a nice even thickness on the dough. We are going to roll this to about half an inch and just enough flour so that the dough is not sticking to the surface. Do not want to have add a whole lot. We are going to go ahead and stamp out about five or six snowflakes, just for demonstration purposes, but again go ahead and get as many as you can out of dough that you have made. You can re-roll the scraps, once you have done with this take and if you are using a relatively intricate cutter as we are in this case, just be careful that when your are poking the dough itself, out of the cutter, you really ensure that the edges are all coming out.

Sometimes, they will stick in the corners. So go ahead and use the end of the spatula or the tip of the knife, or just your finger to make sure all of the dough is coming out in one piece and this makes for a really, really pretty decorative and festive cookie. This is a nice snowflake shape and it is a little bit, this is see how you could break it here, so and that happens. Again that is the risk you run with an intricate cutter.

So you just certainly do the old classic gingerbread man or gingerbread girl, but the snowflake is nice, variation on the theme, and the other thing that will help you really make sure these cookies come out in one piece and not be too much of a nightmare to handle is you want to make sure that the dough itself is actually just chilled well enough. If it is too soft, it really will be a better to handle, so it is definitely important to chill the dough and so again we can go ahead and re-roll the scraps and as you see the size of the cutter will clearly dictate how many cookies you get. The snowflakes we have chosen is a bit of a larger shape and it is important to make sure that all of your cookies are about the same thickness because if you have got some cookies that are rolled too thin and some that are rolled too thick they bake differently.

So you have some cookies that are some what raw in the center and some that just baked too hard. So, just be aware of that and they are ready to go into the oven which is preheated to about 350 and we are going to bake for about ten to 12 minutes. If you roll them relatively thin as we have here, ten to 12 minutes should be just fine. Again, because this particular cookie is dark in color, it is going to be a little bit tricky to determine when they are done. So it is important that you go into the oven after eight to ten minutes or so and poke around in and see how they are coming along. You want them to be firm to the touch and spring back. So into the oven they go. So, now that our gingerbread dough has been baked into snowflakes which are beautiful and they have cooled, we are going to go ahead and take the royal icing that we made earlier. Put it into a parchment cone. So we have cut a long triangle out of parchment paper and then rounded into a cone, filled it with a royal icing and then cut a very, very small fine tip of the end and you want to maybe do a little test run.

Test your royal icing, make sure it is a good consistency, make sure it is coming out of the bag properly and then you can go ahead and really let your imagination go wild, but any sort of dcor or design elements that you think might look nice on the gingerbread, it s a very nice contrast with the white, the royal icing and the dark color of the gingerbread and there is snowflakes. So make some nice and dainty and embellished. Then one final touch we are actually going to add to the end which will make them look really icy, is that we are going to go ahead and some of this sanding sugar to the top of the icing when we are done. Lizzy is doing a great job. You do have to have a bit of a steady hand. That is beautiful. She is just doing nice little curly cues, and the great thing about the royal icing is that it will setup really hard.

So once you have finished decorating your gingerbread snowflakes and then topping them with the sanding sugar, you want to let them sit for at least a few hours. It is really preferable to let them sit overnight and the icing will really firm out and dry nicely and again this really could be used as ornaments and they are certainly edible. So either way, so Lizzy is taking a little bit of the sanding sugar. You can just sprinkle it right over the cookies.

That is got a really nice sparkly effect, you could use -- they actually make sanding sugar in all different colors. You could use a colored sugar, but I like the purity and the starkness of the clear sugar and then you will just go ahead and that is such a nice effect. You will just brush off what is left and the only sugar that you will see is what is sticking to the royal icing, that is sparkling and beautiful.

So these are our Gingerbread Snowflake Cookies. Next we are going to show you how to do Chocolate Peppermint Sandwich Cookies.