SweetSugarBelle's Favorite Gingerbread Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What makes gingerbread taste like gingerbread? ›

Spice Combinations

Some other common spices used in gingerbread recipes are cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, cardamom, and allspice. Cinnamon is available in ground form and in a stick. For baking, you should use ground cinnamon. Nutmeg adds a nutty, sweet spiciness to gingerbread.

Though it's ideal for savory foods such as barbecue sauces and stews, Bourdon cautioned against choosing blackstrap for cookies. “Please avoid this dark and bitter molasses for your baking recipes,” she said. “It will make your cookies dry and quite frankly inedible. The rationale is basic chemistry.

The recipe is simple and straight forward, beginning with the usual steps of creaming butter and sugar. Fancy molasses is the lightest of the molasses varieties and adds the perfect amount of robust sweetness when paired with dark brown sugar.

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!

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.

Gingerbread: In the United States, molasses is the ingredient that gives gingerbread its color and sweetness, but in many other locations, gingerbread recipes use golden syrup. Using golden syrup gives gingerbread a lighter color and a milder flavor.

Brown sugar is actually a combination of granulated sugar and molasses, so it's a good substitute for molasses. While measurements may vary per recipe, you can generally replace 1 cup molasses with 3/4 cup packed brown sugar.

For that deep colour and warming flavour to your Gingerbread, treacle is a must! For those outside the UK struggling to get treacle, molasses can be used as a substitute, although you may need to experiment with the quantities to get the perfect flavour.

Dark Molasses Gingerbread Cake

This is a good place to explore a mix-and-match substitute, so you don't put too much pressure on any one ingredient. In place of the 1 ½ cups molasses, you can swap in ½ cup dark brown sugar, mixed with 1 cup honey, sorghum, or golden syrup.

What can you substitute for molasses in gingerbread? ›

The Best Molasses Substitutes

Honey, dark corn syrup, and maple syrup can also be used to replace molasses in recipes.

Maple Syrup Cookies are very similar to gingerbread cookies, except I replace the molasses with maple syrup and honey. The result is a soft texture with a lighter ginger maple flavor. Honestly, I prefer a softer gingerbread to a crispier one. Eat them plain or decorate with white cookie icing and sprinkle with sugar.

Victorian cook Sarah Nelson invented Grasmere Gingerbread® in 1854 in the English Lake District village from where it gets its name. A unique, spicy-sweet cross between a biscuit and cake, its reputation quickly spread and it is now enjoyed by food lovers all over the world.

Gingerbread, as we know it today, descends from Medieval European culinary traditions. Gingerbread was also shaped into different forms by monks in Franconia, Germany in the 13th century. Lebkuchen bakers are recorded as early as 1296 in Ulm and 1395 in Nuremberg.

According to Rhonda Massingham Hart's Making Gingerbread Houses, the first known recipe for gingerbread came from Greece in 2400 BC.

Gingerbread refers to a broad category of baked goods, typically flavored with ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon and sweetened with honey, sugar, or molasses.

Today it is generally accepted that the spice blend used in gingerbread is ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, anise and molasses/honey. Ginger, is a spice with a warm heat which comes from a rhizome native to Southeast Asia.

Gingerbread is enjoyed in many countries. But while each place may have its own take on the confection, the one thing that remains consistent is the spices they include – the key ingredient being ginger.

In Medieval England, the term gingerbread simply meant “preserved ginger” and wasn't applied to the desserts we are familiar with until the 15th century. The term is now broadly used to describe any type of sweet treat that combines ginger with honey, treacle or molasses.