Tuesday 29 November 2011

Gingerbread boxes - great homemade gift idea

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...).

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:
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.
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.
Peeling away the scraps
Trees ready to go in the oven
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).
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!

One of Mr Sociable's trees
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 :)

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...