Recipe: St Pauls Gingerbread People Recipe
Recipe from our nursery in St Pauls
The children at our nursery in St Pauls are keen bakers! Often cooking and baking new recipes each week. We recently went along when they made gingerbread people. It was so lovely to see how focussed the children all were during the task, taking turns mixing and stirring along with sharing the rolling pins and the cutters… and at the end of it they had some tasty gingerbread! So why not try having a go at making this one at home over Christmas.
Ingredients
350g plain flour, plus extra for dusting
100g butter
175g dark muscovado sugar
85g honey (or golden syrup)
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 egg, beaten
2 tsp vanilla essence
For the icing:
100g of icing sugar and water as per the instructions on the packet. Or use ready made writing icing for ease and to add a bit of colour.
Method
1. Measure out your dry ingredients – plain flour, ground ginger, cinnamon and the bicarbonate of soda. When we did this at the nursery the children took it in turns measuring out the ingredients when we did this in the nursery.
2. Rub in the butter to the dry ingredients. The children kearny how to rub together the mixture using their fingertips as they went.
3. Then add the sugar, honey (or golden syrup), vanilla essence and the egg and mix well! Everyone enjoyed getting involved with mixing, taking turns to do so. If the dough is a little dry at this point you can add a little water to loosen it but be careful to do this gradually.
4. Chill the dough for 30 mins. (recipe continues below)
5. Once the dough is chilled, preheat your oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6.
6. Now you should have a nice firm ball of dough ready to roll out. We broke this into smaller balls so that all the children had a chance to roll out their own piece of dough. Be sure to flour the surface before you start rolling out to avoid it sticking.
7. Once you’ve rolled out the dough nice and evenly so it is roughly a cm thick then you can start cutting out the shapes. We only had one gingerbread person cutter when we did this in the nursery so we used a few other cutter shapes as well and the children shared them and took it in turns to cut out their biscuit.
8. Put the cut out shapes onto a lightly greased baking tray or trays depending on how many biscuits you’ve got out of your dough (this will vary with cutter shapes and sizes) and bake for 10–15 mins
9. Let them cool fully before you decorate with icing.
The proof is in the eating… But also these biscuits would make lovely Christmas presents for the family if you found a festive nice tin to put them in! Bon Appetit.
Special thanks to Sara-Jane, Zaynab and the children at St Pauls for letting us join in and sharing the recipe!
