Gingerbread Christmas Tree

Hello everyone. We are back again after a little break in which Geoff has been overseas quite a bit for work, and I have handed in my thesis (yay!).

Today we spent a lovely day at the Scandinavian Christmas Festival at the Swedish Church in Melbourne. We had some lovely open sandwiches with Swedish meatballs, julmust, cream cakes with strawberries and some Danish æbleskiver.

I promised to post up a gingerbread recipe, so here is a very cute one using gingerbread stars made into Christmas trees with royal icing and some icing sugar and edible glitter sprinkled over the top. If you have any stars left over you can cover them in icing and eat them later (or while you are making your tree...). I used the left over dough to make some snowflake gingerbread biscuits which I intended to post here, however they have since been eaten...

I was inspired by the gingerbread Christmas tree in the latest issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller, however I have used a different gingerbread recipe.

Geoff and I are off to Paris in one week and then to Vienna for Christmas and Berlin for New Years. I am hoping to post up a recipe for gingerbread cheese cake before we leave though. But if I don't get a chance to post before then, have a merry Christmas and a happy new year and thank you for reading our blog this year!

We'll post up some pictures when we get back of the Christmas markets and so on.

So on with the recipe...

You will need:

• 1/2 cups of brown sugar
• 130 g unsalted butter
• 1/2 golden syrup (or treacle)
• 1 egg, separated
• 3 cups of plain flour
• 1 1/2 tbsp ground ginger
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tbsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp bicarb soda
• 200 g icing sugar
• Edible glitter (if you like!)
• Star cookie cutters (6 different sizes)

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius.

Combine your butter and sugar in a mixing bowl and when smooth separate your egg and add the yoke into the mix and combine. Combine in the golden syrup.

Sift in the flour, bi carb soda and spices and combine with the rest of the mixture.

Knead into a smooth ball and wrap in cling wrap and then place in the fridge for at least an hour, but I would recommend a couple of days so the spicy flavours thoroughly infuse the dough.

After at least an hour, take the dough from the fridge and lightly dust a clean surface with some plain flour and well as lightly dusting your rolling pin with flour as well.

Take a little of your dough and roll it until it is fairly thin, no more that about 4 mm high. I started with quite thin stars, but I think it looks a bit better if they are about 4 mm thick. Cut six or so of each sized star (about 12 if you plan to make two ... and you will have enough dough for two) and put them on trays covered in baking paper and place them in the oven for about 10 minutes until they are golden brown.


Repeat for the remaining dough.

For the icing put your left over egg white to good use by using an electric mixer to mix it until it forms fairly stiff peaks and then sift in the icing sugar and combine. If adding in food colouring makes you happy, add some now, however I chose to stick with white.

Once your gingerbread stars have cooled, place the largest on a plate and pipe some of the royal icing onto it and then place another star on top of that. Repeat until you have created an incredibly cute Christmas tree. Then dust a little icing sugar over the whole thing to make it look like snow and add a little edible glitter over that.

Eat and enjoy!