Christmas cookies

The tradition of baking Christmas and New Year cookiesexists in many countries. In principle, New Year's can make any cookies, using molds in the form of Christmas trees, stars, etc. and decorating the finished biscuit with a bright glaze. Make cookies New Year and certain ingredients: ginger, cinnamon, orange peel.

New Year's cookies "Gingerbread Man"

The tradition of baking ginger biscuits in the form of amusingman came to us from the West. There it is very popular, ginger men even became heroes of fairy tales, songs, films and cartoons (remember at least "Shrek"). Stove such a New Year cookie is not too difficult. For its preparation we need the following ingredients.

• 
  flour - how much will take the dough
• 
  unsalted butter - 150 g
• 
  cane sugar (you can take and ordinary) - 0.5 tbsp.
• 
  honey - 0.5 tbsp.
• 
  egg - 1 pc.
• 
  ground or finely grated ginger - 1 tbsp.
• 
  soda - 1 tsp.
• 
  cinnamon - 1 tsp
• 
  baking powder - 0.5 tsp.

• 
  egg white - 1 pc.
• 
  powdered sugar - 1 tbsp.
• 
  lemon juice - 0.5 tsp.

Cut the butter into not too small pieces. Heat the oil, honey and sugar over medium heat, stirring all the time. It is necessary that the sugar is completely melted and not burnt at the same time. Bring the mixture to a boil (if it a little darkens - it's okay, it should be). Remove the saucepan from the fire and immediately pour soda into it. Cool the mixture.

Egg whisk and add to the honey mixture. There we also pour out the baking powder, ginger, cinnamon and flour. The flour should be poured until the dough becomes supple and soft. But it should not be too steep. In comparison, say, with a dumpling test, the resulting dough should come out softer.

Divide the dough into two parts, each littlewe put it in a flat cake, wrap it in a bag and put it in a refrigerator for a couple of hours. Taking out the dough of their oven after this time, turn on the oven so that it warms up to 180 ° C. And while she warms up, we cut out cookies.

For this, we roll the dough in polyethylene up tothickness of 3 mm. Cut the figurines with a mold. If there is no molding, then you can cut out the man's stencil, put it on the dough and gently traverse it with the sharp tip of the knife. The baking tray is lubricated with oil or lined with parchment for baking and we put figurines on it. Cut must be done quickly, so that the dough does not have time to become soft again: it will be hard to transfer soft figures to the baking sheet.

Bake our New Year cookies to hardness(about 8 minutes), let the liver cool down. While it cools, beat the egg white into a foam and, whilst continuing to beat, add sugar powder and lemon juice. The resulting glaze draws the ginger human eyes, mouth and buttons.

New Year's cookies with marzipan

Very popular New Year's baked with marzipan - a mass of ground almonds and sugar powder or sugar syrup. Marzipan is traditionally cooked for Christmas in Holland and Germany. To prepare a New Year's cookie with marzipan, we will need the following products.

• 
  80 g of almonds
• 
  60 g of powdered sugar
• 
  half egg white
• 
  1 tsp liqueur

• 
  150 g of flour
• 
  100 g of softened butter
• 
  75 g of sugar
• 
  1 tsp ground ginger
• 
  0.5 tsp baking powder

• 
  110 g apricot confiture
• 
  75 g of powdered sugar
• 
  2 tablespoons unsweetened condensed milk
• 
  food coloring

Marzipan must be cooked a day before yougoing to bake New Year cookies. Almond is filled with boiling water, dried and passed through a meat grinder. We add sugar powder, liquor and protein to the ground almonds, carefully mix the mass and put it in a cool place for a day.

We connect marzipan with sugar and softenedbutter. Sifted flour is combined with a baking powder and ground ginger and, stirring, add to the oil-marzipan mixture. We knead the dough, wrap it in a film and put it in the refrigerator for two hours.

Roll the dough in polyethylene to a thickness ofhalf a centimeter and cut out the Christmas biscuits (stars, herringbone, etc.) with molds. Bake the biscuits for 8-10 minutes in the oven, preheated to 180 ° C, then remove from the oven and let it cool.

Confiture a little warmed up, we grease them with biscuits. Sugar powder is mixed with milk, colored with food coloring and coated with the resulting glaze cookies.

Bon Appetit!