Gingerbread Hearts

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Our son has recently shown quite an interest in baking. So I decided to try creating something which I thought he’d enjoy making and consuming, and settled on gingerbread hearts. It’s a simple recipe adapted from various online sources, and suitable for vegans. I tend to improvise rather than plan my baking, so it was a good discipline to follow a recipe for a change.

Ingredients

350g plain flour
140g dairy-free margarine or butter
100g dark muscovado sugar
3tbsp golden syrup
2tsp ground cinnamon
1tsp ground ginger
1 tsp baking powder

Method

Melt the margarine, sugar, and golden syrup gently in a pan before transferring to a bowl and leaving to cool slightly. This was a good opportunity to learn about being mindful when cooking, and making sure we stayed safe around the oven.

Once cooled, add the flour, spices, and baking powder and stir until the mixture forms a smooth dough. Our local supermarket had no ground ginger, so I substituted a ginger purée, which worked very well.

Chill the dough for around 40 minutes, until it is firm.

Roll out onto a lightly floured surface, and cut into desired shapes. Our dough was about 0.5 cm thick when we cut it, and by rerolling the cuttings, we made about 20 hearts from the mixture. It’s fair to say that a certain amount of dough was consumed by the official taste tester toddler during this process. I suspect we could have made more had we used all the dough.

Finally, we lined a couple of baking trays with greaseproof paper, and cooked the gingerbread for around 15 minutes at 180 degrees C (use 200 degrees C if you’re not using a fan assisted oven, or gas mark 6).

If the hearts had lasted longer, we might have decorated them. But once cool enough, they were eaten very quickly by our gingerbread loving household.

A different sort of post, but I hope the recipe is easy to follow. Baking with children is a fun learning experience. It’s also an important part of understanding where food comes from, and encourages mindfulness of the preparation process behind the products we consume.