Today I made some gingerbread gift-boxes with Mr Sociable & my friend, Sandra. I am planning for Mr Sociable to give these to his grandparents for Christmas, filled with nuts or lollies (grandparents, if you are reading this, please look enthusiastic on Christmas day...).
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| One of the finished gift-boxes |
I got the idea from the Coles Christmas magazine (free at the registers at the moment). In the magazine, they were serving them as a dessert, filled with lindt balls. Our designs are quite different to theirs:
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| from the Coles Christmas magazine, 2011 |
I've made quite a few gingerbread houses from kits, but I've never baked gingerbread before. As a gingerbread novice, I learned a couple of things along the way:
1. It's easier to roll out the dough if you put baking paper on top of the dough, as well as underneath.
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| Rolling out the dough between 2 sheets of baking paper |
2. It's easier to peel the scraps away from the tree/box, rather than trying to move the shape onto the baking tray. So roll out the dough on a piece of baking paper that will fit on your tray.
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| Peeling away the scraps |
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| Trees ready to go in the oven |
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Trees baked (as you can see, they don't spread a lot,
so you don't need to leave a lot of gap between them). |
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| Boxes cooling, ready to decorate |
Mr Sociable decorated a few trees for his preschool teachers and the roofs of all the grandparents' boxes. After that, he lost interest and left Sandra and I to it!
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| One of Mr Sociable's trees |
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| Lots of trees |
I think this recipe was actually a bit too soft to make boxes. It worked really well for the trees and tastes delicious, but the boxes are not as well-formed as I had hoped. I have held them together with pins and lots of icing. I'm hoping they will harden up a bit over the next few weeks.
If you have a recipe for firm gingerbread, you may enjoy making these as a little hand-made gift for someone this Christmas :)
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