Gingerbread Cookies

I really do have too much energy for spending my time being idle and doing really boring repetitive tasks. Thus I find stuff to really care about. Yeah, okay, I really care about my kids but it would be really unhealthy to obsess about their development too much. I can just imagine it, "Siiri, I see you drew a sun, again! But you already knew how to draw it! Now try to draw a cat. Practice!" . If I really want to push someone to change and improve themselves for my entertainment, I'd rather it would be me. So I try to learn new things.

I have horrible memory, so at first I tried to do some memory exercises. Pretty soon I realized that it's frustrating to spend my time doing something I'm terrible at. Then I thought I would learn to dance better. I'm not good at it, but it's not nearly as bad as with memory. I took on the challenge to master all the dances on Kinect's "Dance Central 2". That was also going badly enough that I kind of gave up. It's wonderful physical exercise but I'm pretty sure that's one challenge that is not really worth the effort. At least not with my grasp of choreography and my lacking physical memory. Then I thought - I haven't made the perfect gingerbread cookies! 

Gingerbread cookies are not just a sugary treat. They symbolize my favorite holiday!  There's so much tasty food that is only eaten during Christmas. I'm not religious at all anymore and the entire baby Jesus theme is just a nice childhood memory, especially because I barely hear anything about Jesus anymore now that I'm surrounded by spiritualists, pagans, atheists and agnostics. I love Christmas for all the candles and spices, the smell of a spruce tree and the activity of baking and eating fresh gingerbread cookies.  As long as I remember, Christmas has always had those things. Most people don't really think about it but when you have kids, the things you do become their childhood memories. How could Siiri have a childhood memory of family Christmas if we're too lazy to celebrate Christmas. That just won't do! We should make the most of it! I want my kids to have childhood memories of Christmas that are worth remembering. One thing that I always remember about Christmas, is when we were kids, we took a bunch of gingerbread dough and made all kinds of shapes and a lot of cookies. Everything was covered in flour and the entire home smelled like gingerbread spices. We always bought the dough and the quality was different every time. How about if I learn to make our own gingerbread dough, so that it will be good every time. My kids could some day eat store-bought cookies and say, "yeah, it's good, but not as good as the ones mom makes.". It's a silly thing to take pride in but I really want to be able to make something better than can be bought in a store, something uniquely excellent.

I started by researching recipes on Internet. The basic idea is that you melt and caramelize sugar, add water, butter and more sugar, then let cool a bit, add spices, let cool a bit more and then add egg and flour. Easy enough. Except it's such a classic treat that everyone has their own recipe. Another problem is that the recipes have been modernized to contain margarine, "gingerbread spice" and special caramelized sugar syrup. I really wanted an ancient-sounding recipe, like something that grannies might have used decades ago. I picked two recipes that were as different as possible. One of them was a really basic gingerbread dough recipe from an old soviet era cooking book. Those cookies were good but nothing special. The other recipe was interesting, though. I found it in some forum post (that I haven't been able to find again). It said, "This is my great-great-aunt's recipe...". WOW, cool!   A recipe with genuine ancient family background. That's exactly what I'm looking for! Also, the recipe said, "and then add hot coffee". Plus it had twice as many spices and herbs as any other recipe!

Both recipes contained orange zest (orange part of the orange peel) but I know from experience that adding orange zest sometimes it leaves visible small pieces of orange peel in the pastry. My goal was to make perfect cookies so I wanted to avoid that. Then I had an idea - I will dry the peels and then quickly grind them to dust with a mortar and pestle. So I took the orange and peeled it with a potato peeler. Superb thickness, without any of the bitter white part. Then I let it dry overnight. The next morning I got up and inspected it - the long orange peels had turned into long pieces of orange rubber.  I tried to grind one piece. After two minutes of grinding it was still the same piece of rubber. Sugar will surely help! A added some sugar and used the mortar and pestle for another couple of minutes and inspected it - now it looked like an orange piece of rubber half-hidden in powdered sugar.  "No, that doesn't look right!". I searched it on the Internet and found out I was supposed to dry the peels  for 3-4 days. I didn't have 3-4 days!  Okay, but I could just apply a bit of heat. So I put it in the oven at 120 C and the oven fan turned on. About 30 minutes later I was walking around the kitchen being happy with my idea to try the oven until I smelled something strange - cooked orange peels! Gaaah! I rushed to the oven and took them out. They were completely dry and crispy but half of it now looked slightly brown. Well, at least it was dry. So I tried to grind it: in stead of orange dust, it turned into orange sand, leaving visible small pieces of orange peel in the cookies.  Epilogue: The next time I just used a fine grater on fresh oranges and ended up with fine wet powder perfect for the cookies!

Okay, so I'll give you the recipe as well. I'll add the spice names in Estonian because even I don't know the translation of some of them. 1 dl is 100 ml. 100 ml liquid weighs roughly 100g. The first time there wasn't enough water or I added too much flour. The result was a very crumbly dough which couldn't be used until I added water and flour just before we made the cookies. The second time I made it, I added water to the dough before I let it sit in the refrigerator. The second time I also used twice the amount allspice and caramelized the sugar even darker. It looks and smells even better than the first time. 

PS! We actually baked the gingerbread cookies with several friends  and we had four different kinds of dough, including two (Eesti Pagar and Vertigo) that had got the best rating in two separate articles comparing gingerbread doughs sold in Estonia. This dough was most people's favorite that night.
PPS! Vertigo's dough was very good. Eesti Pagar's dough was bland and the cookies turned into wood the next day.

Gingerbread Cookies

2 dl sugar (for caramelizing)

1.5 dl hot coffee

3 dl sugar (originally 2.5-3 dl)

250 g butter

Spices:

---0.5 tsp clove (nelk)

---1 tsp cinnamon (kaneel)

---1 orange zest or 1 lemon zest (riivitud koor)

---0.5 tsp cardamom (kardemon)

---0.5 tsp powdered ginger (jahvatatud ingver)

---a bit of nutmeg  (muskaatpähkel)

---5-6 allspice berries, ground (jahvatatud vürtspipra tera)

1 egg

800-900 g flour (I used pastry flour 405)

3-4 tsp baking powder

Pour 2 dl sugar into a thick-bottomed pot and caramelize. This is the tricky part. I had best result when I used two spoons and when the sugar started to melt, I kept the sides of the pot and the spoons clean of the melted sugar, otherwise it will turn hard in only a moment. When sugar is sufficiently brown, remove the pot from heat and then add hot coffee. Be careful. Mix constantly and beware the steam. Then mix (on very low heat) until sugar is dissolved. Sounds easier than it is. I kept adding small amounts of water because it took so long. Remove from heat and add butter. Add sugar and butter and mix and melt it all together. Let the mixture cool. When it's half-way cooled, add spices. When it's completely cooled, mix in the egg and flour, with baking powder mixed into the flour. Add water if the dough is too crumbly. Refrigerate for a couple of days before using the dough.