Thursday 20 December 2012

Gingerbread cookies for Teacher...

a great budget gift - festive gingerbread cookies - baking with kids


I always struggle at the end of term or Christmas with what to buy for Ben's teachers and Elizabeth's nursery staff. With four nursery staff in E's room at nursery and other staff that she sees daily too as well as a Teacher Two teaching assistants, a SENCO and after school club staff for Ben the costs of even token gifts mount up. So this year we decided to make something instead. Not only is this a way of saving money, it also means that the gift is more personal and we get to have do a fun activity too!

So on Tuesday after school we got out the children's baking set we were kindly sent from Aldi along with some Christmas themed cookie cutters and got to making some gingerbread cookies. We used this simple recipe from the BBC website:


It was really easy to make and both Ben and Elizabeth enjoyed helping. The great thing about gingerbread dough is it's really forgiving so great for children to 'play' with.

So we needed....

  • 350g plain flour 
  • 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 2 tsp ground ginger
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 125g butter
  • 175g light soft brown sugar
  • 1 free-range egg
  • 4 tbsp golden syrup

    (we actually doubled this recipe as we needed quite a lot!)

    The Preparation was nice and simple, we started off by sifting together the flour, bicarb of soda and cinnamon before pouring into the food processor. We then added the butter and continued until the mixture was the consistency of breadcrumbs. Then stirred in the sugar (Elizabeth was in charge of stirring!)
    While we were doing this I had helped Ben crack the eggs in another bowl and added the golden syrup, which he was beating together. We added this to the processor and continued until the mixture became doughy. Mummy then kneaded the dough and we then wrapped it in some clingfilm and popped in the fridge for a short time, while we had a tidy up... (How had we made so much mess already?!)
    After 1 minutes I turned the oven to 180c (30F / Gas mark 4) and got the baking trays ready.

    Now for the fun bit!! We rolled out the dough to around 1cm thick and cut out lots of fun shapes from stars to gingerbread men and Christmas Trees! 

    After baking for 15 minutes, we let them cool for another 15 (while the next batch went in ) and started decorating! We had writing, icing mini dazzles and colourful sugar stars, Ben may have got a little excited with these!

    So we had great fun decorating and now it was time for the little ones to get sorted for bathtime with Daddy while I divided up the cookies into four boxes (these were cupcake boxes I had bought a while ago for 50p a pack!)

    We sent a box of a dozen cookies in to school, after school club and nursery and  took the left overs to work to give to my colleagues as an alternative to Christmas cards!


    gift boxed festive star gingerbread cookies - baking with kids

    Boxes of Festive Gingerbread cookies - A great budget gift that shows a lot of thought and is really fun to prepare!

    Ben wants to know when we are baking them again!

     

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