We’ve made gingerbread houses each year at Christmas-time for years. It’s a highlight of the holiday season for the boys: candy, sugary icing, gingerbread cookies… a likely favorite for any child, right? Traditionally, we purchased a gingerbread kit, complete with precut cookies, tubes of royal icing, and an assortment of colorful candies. These kits worked well: a perfect balance of effort and results to keep the project fun for the littlest ones.
circa Christmas 2004
Never one to let “good enough” ride, however, a couple of years ago, I got the crazy notion that we should make a gingerbread house from scratch. You know, roll out the dough, cut out the house, make our own icing to hold everything together. Not too hard, right? Of course not, lots of people make their own gingerbread houses each year. We could, too.
So, two Christmases ago, the boys received a Williams Sonoma gingerbread house cookie cutter set and an assortment of decorator candies as their
pickle gift. (No, not all of our pickle gifts are food-related, although I can see where you might get that idea). For whatever reason, I can’t remember now, we didn’t make the gingerbread house right away that day, or the next day, or the next… um… month… or (sigh) the next year… and then the boys were diagnosed with allergies to wheat and dairy and I wondered if we’d ever get to make that gingerbread house.
I searched on-line and did find a
GF/CF gingerbread cookie recipe that with a few modifications (modified recipe below) looked like it would work for us, and so this year, – albeit a bit after Christmas – we made gf/cf gingerbread houses! Honestly, they weren’t all that difficult. In fact, the hardest part was getting the dough rolled out to just the right thickness so that the notched pieces on the one house side cookie would match up and fit into the notched pieces on the adjoining house side cookie. (Next year, we’ll design our own gingerbread house pattern. Eh-hem, yes, I know, I’m adding another step, but those cookie cutters were just too difficult to use… and the boys commented that the
houses cottages were a bit small to hold all of the candy they had intended to use).
All in all, however, our gingerbread making efforts were a success! The cookies are delicious, and the houses turned out cute as can be, even if not exactly stylish (Telling the boys they could eventually eat whatever candy was on their houses led to a rush to use as many dum-dum lollipops as possible, and made for a couple of interesting creations). At the end of the day, the boys were all smiles!
So, if you’re wanting to make some delicious gf/cf gingerbread cookies of your own, here’s our modified version of Karen Joy’s GF/CF gingerbread cookie recipe. The original recipe calls for sweet white rice flour, which I didn’t have, and brown rice flour, which since it’s a rice flour, I am trying to move away from. I substituted a mixture of sorghum flour, millet flour, and fava bean flour for the majority of the two rice flours. Honestly, I didn’t measure how much of each I used. This recipe uses a TON of flour and I just used up what I had. I’m estimating that I used about 1.5 cups of brown rice flour, 1.5 cups of millet flour, 1.5 cups of sorghum flour, and 1.5 cups of fava bean flour, but I’m thinking that this recipe is probably pretty forgiving as far as which flours are used, as long as the total amount of flour remains the same. So, given that, here’s our modified recipe:
1 cup amaranth flour
1.5 cups sorghum flour
1.5 cups fava bean flour
1.5 cups millet flour
1.5 cups brown rice flour
2 cups potato starch
2 Tbsp xanthan gum
2 Tbsp baking powder
2 Tbsp ground ginger
1 Tbsp ground allspice
1 Tbsp ground cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp ground cloves
3 cups powdered sugar
2 cups dark brown sugar
2 cups shortening
1 cup eggs (this is about 4-5 eggs depending on their size; measure in a glass measuring cup)
1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp dark molasses
1 Tbsp salt
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
In a large bowl, mix together the flours, starch, xanthan gum, baking powder and spices until well-combined. Set aside.
In another large bowl, cream together the sugars, shortening, eggs, molasses, and salt.
Add flour mixture to the sugar mixture, 2 cups at a time, stirring with a wooden spoon. Keep mixing and kneading and whatever else it takes until ALL THAT FLOUR is incorporated.
Roll the dough at room temperature for best results. This dough was incredibly easy to work with. It rolls and re-rolls beautifully. The smaller cookies transferred easily from the table where we rolled them out (on parchment paper) to the lined cookie sheets. Larger pieces we rolled directly on the cookie sheet liners so as to not have to move them.
I found that about 8-10 minutes was about all these cookies needed, in my oven. The original recipe suggests a much longer baking time, however, so watch the first couple of batches and adjust your baking times as necessary. I think it has a lot to do with how thin you’ve rolled the cookies.
BTW, if you aren’t making a huge house and don’t want 8-dozen or more cookies, you might want to cut this recipe in half! The dough does refrigerate and freeze well.
