Your Gingerbread Creations Wanted!
We're busy getting ready for our first Home-Grown Christmas Weekend, and part of this is the Gingerbread Doddington Hall. This year's has now been baked, built and decorated by Claire Birch, but Claire would like to display your gingerbread creations as well! Why not make something, and enter our competition? You could create a building, person, scene etc. and anyone, or any group, of people, can enter. The best will be displayed in the Hall as a part of the Christmas decorations.
Bring your entry in from Saturday 28th November, with closing date 19 December. Please package your creation carefully, and mark the box with your name and contact details. If your entry is particularly large, please call ahead to 01522 694 308. The winning entry receives a £20 Christmas Goodie Bag and the gingerbread Doddington Hall (may not be edible).
Here's the recipe Claire has used to make her gingerbread Doddington Hall. Good Luck!
200 ml golden syrup
100g butter
1 tbs ground cinnamon
1 tbs ground ginger
1 tsp ground cardamom
1/2 tsp ground cloves
300 ml milk
1 tbs sodium bicarbonate
900g flour
Melt the sugar, syrup, butter and spices together in a saucepan, add the milk, then let the mixture cool for a couple of minutes. Finally add the flour and bicarbonate, having combined them first. Fold in well. Preheat your oven to 175 degrees centigrade. Roll out to around half a cm thickness, then cut out your shapes slightly larger than needed. (You should work this out first, perhaps making a paper template.) Cook your pieces in the middle of the oven for 10 - 20 minutes depending on the size of each. (They will not be totally hard when they come out of the oven but when they cool they will harden up and become quite tough. If you overcook them and they dry out too much in the oven they will be more breakable.) Unfortunately the pieces tend to change shape a little in the oven, depending on how much they were stretched out by the rolling pin before baking. After they have cooled it is quite easy to trim off the edges with a serrated knife - this makes it much easier to stick the pieces together.
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