Cinnamon and Ginger Christmas Cookies

Hello Friends :) 

Satch here. Salt's been a bit zealous with the ol' blog posting so I thought I'd better keep up my end of the bargain! 

Over the last few years I've been a bit obsessed with baking, (I make a pretty excellent cupcake, it must be said) and since I spent 6 months being unemployed with Nathy Nath and Sophie Davis (who must always be fully named) that baking bug has only grown! Those kids certainly know their way around a good bake, so thanks to a lot of Baking Thursdays (and Nath's unhealthy obsession with Catherine from Great British Bake Off) I've managed extend my repetoire beyond cupcakes and branched out into all sorts of lovely treats! 

This certainly came in handy over Christmas, as I was only employed from the beginning of December and had to find some way of showing love to people without actually spending any money on them! Luckily, I found this cinnamon cookie recipe online, but I gave it a bit of a twist and ended up inventing amazing icing in the process! 

What you need for the cookies: 

150g/5oz Self-Raising Flour
150g/50z Plain Flour
2 Teaspoons of Ground Cinnamon
125g/4.5oz Butter
100g/3.75oz Caster Sugar
1 Egg 
1 Blog-Writing Buddy to do all the mixing for you! 

What you need for the icing: 

Water
Icing Sugar (the amount varies depending on how many cookies you have/how much you colossally mess up the simple process of adding water to sugar!) 
(Roughly) Half a teaspoon of Cinnamon
(Roughly) Half a teaspoon of Ginger
Food Colouring

To make the cookies, mix together the butter and sugar and then add the egg (the recipe says to beat it first but I never bother and it turns out just the same!) 

Then add in both types of flour and the cinnamon together (again, the recipe says to sieve it together separately in a bowl but who can be bothered with that either?!) 

Mix it all together until it forms a ball of dough (you might have to get your hands involved!) 

Sprinkle some flour on the surface and knead the dough a little bit just to make sure it all comes together. 

Roll out your dough so that it's roughly half a centimetre thick (these cookies are meant to be soft rather than snappable so they're a bit rubbish if they're too thin) 

Cut out your shapes with some fun cookie cutters (I tend to wiggle them about in the flour first so the cookie doesn't stick to the cutter) 

Pop them on a baking tray and put them in the oven at 160oC for 10 minutes. (It's better to underdo it than over do it!) Leave them to cool while you do your icing! 

For the icing, mix roughly 100g of icing sugar, a sprinkle of water and the ginger and cinnamon. I do this by experimentation so I'm afraid it's not an exact science!

Add in as much food colouring as you want, but you want a decent colour because ginger makes icing look a bit pooey...I picked red because it's Christmassy, and I'm not sure how I feel about green icing.

Then keep tasting the mixture and adding water/sugar/cinnamon/ginger as required until it all comes together nicely, but don't overdo it on the spices because it can come with a real kick! 

Then hold a tea spoon of the icing above the cookies and move it back and forth, letting the icing fall in a zig zag onto the cookies.

Let it dry and voila! 

Depending on the size of your cutter, one lot of dough goes a long way - However, when Salt joined me for cookie-making fun, a lot of the dough mysteriously disappeared...

Over Christmas I wrapped a few up in a bundle of greaseproof paper with a nice ribbon round the top, which looked pretty cool!

Cinnamon and ginger are pretty Christmassy flavours, but change the cookie cutter to something less festive and they're great cookies to make all year round. For my birthday party (which was disney princessy) I used pink icing and a heart-shaped cutter. On a random occassion I also experimented with bright blue icing on stars and dalek-shaped cookies, but my cousin Naomi found that too shocking as an icing hue!