Soft Gingerbread Men

Yes, I'm watching scary stuff on Netflix and well, it's not really as scary as everyone was making it out to be but here we are. Halloween is coming and well, I wanted to use some more autumnal flavours to create a perfect soft gingerbread. We can all make a snappy gingerbread with tons of sugar and all of its very unhealthy. But, softer gingerbread creates a meltier flavour and has a little bit less sugar in it for those of us looking to cut down. There's some heat involved here and the chilling takes about an hour to do it properly. One thing that is pretty good though is that the cooling of the biscuits don't take too much time. I hope you enjoy reading this recipe as much as I enjoyed making it...

I'll add some little tips as we go through the recipe to keep the gingerbread nice and soft.

(Again, all dairy ingredients can be swapped out for dairy-free ingredients)

Part 1: The Dough

Ingredients:

• 100g Butter
• 90g Demerara sugar
• 3 tbsp Honey
• 3 tbsp Ground ginger
• 1 tbsp Ground cinnamon
• 225g Plain flour
• 1/2 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 2-3 tbsp milk

I nearly always use orange flavoured honey in all my baking because it smells really good. Honestly, I hate how sweet honey is, but it gets the job done when you need to add some sweetness and moisture to a biscuit like this one. I wouldn't recommend using honey in a normal biscuit dough though because it can make it quite hard. Let's take a look at how this is made...

How To:

1. Heat the butter in a pan and melt it completely (put it on a really low heat so it doesn't burn) and add the sugar in, stirring it so it mixes together
2. After the sugar and butter are blended, add the honey and mix together once again. It should be a liquid-like consistency
3. Once you've created your liquid-like consistency from these three ingredients, set it aside to cool
4. Into a mixing bowl put your spices, your bicarbonate of soda and your plain flour. Mix this together so that the mixture turns a brownish colour, one that you would expect to be a shade or so darker than a regular gingerbread
5. Once these dry ingredients have been mixed together, then slowly add the wet ingredients you had set aside to cool. One of my great tips when adding it is to set your electric mixer to a really slow setting so that the wet ingredients don't start to curdle in your dry ingredients - it can make it a little clumpy
6. Mix your dough together and slowly add the milk. Use only as much as it takes to get it to come together. The dough will probably be soft to the touch but it will completely harden in the fridge
7. Place your finished dough into a container and chill in the fridge for one hour

Part 2: The Baking

I guess this would be the easier part for you guys but for me its the equivalent of a nightmare. I always forget that when I've made the dough, I'm going to have to shape and construct these things. The baking is the nice part but the cutting and the decorating is something I could do without. I'm not going to tell you how to decorate your gingerbread but if you'd like to know, I used very finely rolled fondant.

How To:

1. Preheat your oven to 180/C
2. Put a large empty plate in the fridge (no seriously, trust me here. Would I ever tell you to do something so stupid if it wasn't useful?)
3. Once your dough has cooled it should be worryingly hard. You will probably be getting it out of the fridge thinking 'how am I going to roll this out? It's practically a rock!'
4. Kneed the dough slightly, but not to much as to not overwork it - you don't want your biscuits being tough and inedible
5. You'll find you can definitely crack it up to become a bit softer and then, you can start rolling it out to be about as thick as an iPhone (yes, I'm using objects to measure things again, you should know me by now)
6. Cut your biscuits using your biscuit cutter and place them evenly on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper (remember: they are going to expand slightly, so leave a little room next to each one)
7. Put them in the oven for about 8-10 minutes so they have browned from the edges
8. They should be slightly soft when you take them out of the oven and you'll need to transfer them to a cold plate to cool so you can take that plate out of the fridge now and put your gingerbread on it. Well, this will stop them from going soft from the bottom. You'll still get that classic bite of the gingerbread but it will be softer from the inside
9. Once your gingerbread has completely cooled you can get to decorating them. This whole process should take you almost two hours including chilling the dough and cooling the biscuits. I have no idea how long decorating will take you - it takes me long enough!

Conclusion

I've been writing a lot of recipes lately and as you can see, I've had to stop a little series of mine that was actually doing alright. I might come back to it in 2026 but for now, I simply can't take researching that stuff that much. Sometimes it can get a bit dark in there. I hope you have enjoyed it all so far though and I also hope I get to share some more recipes with you all ❤️