Christmas Honey Spiced Cookies

Hello everyone!

I'm Helen and this is my very first Instructable. To take part in this contest I've been asked by husband. He is a member of this community and one of first persons who tasted results of my baking experiments. Do not worry, he is alive and have a good look. Today I'm delighted to share a recipe for the Christmas Cookies and show you how to create and decorate presents from the Ginger cookies. Some of my friends from UK calls this sort of bakery "biscuits". I'm not sure how to call this properly, but recommend you to try and taste. All cookie cutters that are used in this instructable are attached to the step 1, so you can download, print and repeat the same design idea. If you have some cutters at home - feel free to use them and create you own amazing cookies.

• 200 g honey

• 200 g white sugar

• 1/2 tsp ground star anise

• 1/2 tsp ground cardamom

• 1/2 tsp ground ginger

• 1 tsp ground cinnamon

• 1 tsp vanilla paste

• 10 g baking soda

• 100 g unsalted butter

• 2 whole eggs + 1 egg yolk

• 550-600 g flour + some flour for dough roll out

Take the honey, all spices and vanilla paste then putt all together into the high sided pot with a thick bottom. Warm this up on the mid fire with constant mixing with a spoon. When bubbles start appearing, add sugar, mix, close the pan with lid and leave on the mid fire until sugar dissolved. This stage takes approximately 10 minutes.

Take off the pan from the fire and add soda. GET READY, THIS STUFF’S GONNA FOAM UP! This is why we wanted the high sided pot. Start mixing until mixture becomes darker, please check photo 3 for the reference. Be careful, this stuff is very hot.

Add butter into the hot mixture and continue mixing until all butter dissolved.

In the separate pot: Use the fork and beat eggs and yolk, slightly mix, do not wipe. Once this done, add the egg mixture to the hot dough base, that we made in the previous step. You have to do this with a thin trickle with continuously mixing. After this, move all this stuff into the stand mixer's bowl.

Use the suitable for dough whisk from your stand mixer manufacturer. Add 550 g of flour and start the mixer on low speed until mass become homogeneous. It takes about 5 minutes.

Dough have to be soft and do not stick to the gloves (hands), if dough sticking to the hands, add some 25-50g of flour and mix it.

Scrap the bowl and put the dough into a plastic bag. Store in fridge about 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 180 ˚C

Scatter the table surface with a flour.

Roll out the dough by the rolling pin for the thin ≈ 5mm. Better to user adjustable rolling pin, it's very handy and help to get a same thin for all cookies.

Use cutters with any shape and cut some cookies from the dough.

Note: If you decided one of the suggested designs, it's mandatory to cut the donut shape, because that will be a base for our "Christmas wreath".

First option for baking. All cookies are backed as individual shapes.

Put all cut shapes on the silicone baking grid or baking paper and bake in the preheated oven at 180 ˚C for about 10 minutes. Take off the baked cookies and let them cool.

Note: Baking time depends on cookies size, smaller one will be ready a bit faster.

Second option for baking is to assemble "Christmas wreath" from the separate shapes before baking. To reach this, you have to put separate cookies in desired shape on the baking surface and moisture the adjacent surfaces with a water. Bake in the preheated over at 180 ˚C about 10 minutes.

As result, you'll get the solid wreath, that requires only decoration with royal icing and sprinkles.

When you've baked cookies and they cooled down, the'y are ready to be shared with your kids, friends and relatives. But… you can proceed with two more steps and get these cookies decorated and more amazing.

For assembly and decoration we have to prepare royal icing. It's very simple.

Recipe:

45 g egg whites

250 g sugar powder

3 drops of the lemon juice

Put all ingredients together in the mixer bowl and mix them about 5 minutes on mid speed.

After 5 minutes mixture should look white and cream like.

Put some icing into the piping bag and cut the tip. On this stage you can start decorating second baked option (whole Christmas wreath). It's very easy, because it doesn't require assembly steps and all elements on their places.

This option is a bit harder and require some more time than previous one. This option looks much impressive and looks "volumetric". You can also use any kind of edible decor.

So…

Take the baked shape of donut, make a circle with royal icing like on the second photo, attached to this step. Stick a couple of cookies to the icing in random order. That will create a second level of decor.

If you spotted some empty spaces in the initial decoration level, we can hover them with another one level of decor. To get this done we have to apply icing to the back side of another one cookie, that we're going to add, see photo #6

Once assembly and decoration stage done, we have to leave them until icing dried, that takes about 4-8 hours. After this we can put them in any kind of gift boxes. That's it!

Love people around you and give them delicious, "FUNtastic" handmade cookies.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. More ideas about cookies decoration you can find in my Instagram