Perfect Gingerbread Cookies Recipe! (2024)

FAQs

Are gingerbread cookies supposed to be hard or soft? ›

Should gingerbread cookies be hard or soft? Soft gingerbread biscuits are ideal. They ought to be flexible. However, they should still be somewhat elastic, and if you hold them too firmly because you're so excited to eat them, you might even be able to leave your fingerprints on the cookie!

Add molasses and vanilla and beat until completely incorporated. Reduce mixer speed to low and add flour mixture until thoroughly combined, about 1 minute. Dough should be soft (not dry or crumbly) but not sticky. If sticky, add a few tablespoons of flour until desired consistency is achieved.

Crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, these cookies have just the right balance of sweet and spice. Here are a few tricks of the trade to make the best gingerbread cookies yet — and the mistakes that can lead to subpar results.

Key Ingredients in Gingerbread Cookies

Because of the added sticky sweetener (molasses), I add a little more flour to help soak it all up. Just like when we are making pinwheel cookies, a bit of extra flour helps the cookies can keep their shape.

Mistake #2: Not resting your dough

After the gingerbread is cut out, Lomas recommends putting it into the fridge for at least 30 minutes and up to three days. Chilling the dough before it goes into a hot oven gives the butter a chance to firm up and reduces how much it spreads when baking.

Divide the dough into two thick disks and wrap each disk in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until chilled, about 3 hours. (The dough can be prepared up to 2 days ahead.) To roll out the cookies, work with one disk at a time, keeping the other disk refrigerated.

On the day you choose to bake your gingerbread, you will need to remove it from the fridge and let it rest between 1/2 an hour and an hour or so before you start rolling it out. It will feel quite hard but don't worry a little bit of massaging will soften it up and make it an excellent dough to work with.

Dry – “Dry” or “Crumbly” dough is a product of over-mixing or using too much of any ingredient during the mixing process. This can be reversed by adding one to two tablespoons of liquid (water, milk or softened butter) to your mix.

A 1:4 ratio of butter to flour makes the gingerbread strong. Corn syrup keeps freshly baked gingerbread pliable and soft, so it's easy to cut while warm. Rolling the dough directly on parchment makes it easy to transfer to the pan.

An excessive amount of butter makes it where the flour is unable to absorb the combined fat, which causes the cookie to spread too widely and the sugar to carbonize more easily because it's surrounded by too buttery a dough.

How do you know when gingerbread is done? ›

Timing is the key to achieving the crispy edges and chewy centers of a perfect gingerbread cookie. Due to gingerbread's dark color, it can be tricky to tell when they're done baking—look for puffed up, just-set centers. Gingerbread cookies will collapse as they cool, delivering that chewy cookie texture.

“Baking cookies in a too-cool oven will cause the fat to melt before your cookies set up, leading to spreading,” Dawn says. Grab an oven thermometer the next time you're in the grocery store so you can be sure your oven is at the correct temperature.

Golden Syrup

With its golden, amber color, it is lighter than molasses, though the two are similar in their thickness. Golden syrup also a liquid sweetener, so 1 cup of golden syrup can replace 1 cup of molasses. Golden syrup has a unique flavor, so it may alter the flavor of your recipe slightly.

Extra sugar made this cookie way too hard.

As was expected because of the extra brown sugar, this cookie looked dark in color and took on the texture of molasses.

One of the best ways to know that your cookies are ready to come out of the oven is when they're firmly set. They shouldn't be rock hard, but they also shouldn't be moist or mushy anymore.

Gingerbread Cookies are done when they are set and begin to brown slightly at the edges. They will harden further as they cool, so avoid overbaking so you don't end up with hard, crunchy gingerbread! Underbake slightly to achieve soft, slightly chewy gingerbread cookies.