Finnish Gingerbread Cookies

When I was a kid I knew Christmas was upon us when I smelled the gingerbread cookies. That smell is Christmas for me.

My challenge this year was to get all of the ingredients here in Germany - to find out what they are called in German and to get them from the supermarket. There’s one ingredient I couldn’t find - bitter orange peel powder. So I used sweet orange peels instead, dried in the oven overnight and then ground as fine as possible. The effect is not exactly the same - not worse, but just different. Germans have their own version of gingerbread: they call them Lebkuchen. The main difference is that they're made with honey instead of molasses and the spices used are slightly different. I'm obviously very biased, so you might guess which ones I prefer.

This is what you need (it’s impossible to say how many you’ll get, it depends on the size of the cookie cutters you’re using - but one portion gives you one big plate full of them):

• 50ml molasses


• 125g butter (margarine for vegan cookies)


• 90g sugar


• 0,5 tsp cinnamon, ground ginger, cloves, bitter orange peel, each


• 0,2 tsp cardamom and allspice, each


• 1 egg (replace with 100g sour soy cream / some other vegan cream)


• 500ml flour (more or less 300g) - I baked mine this year with whole-grain spelt instead of all-purpose wheat flour, and it worked!


• 0,3 tsp salt


• 1 tsp baking soda

Place butter, sugar, molasses, and the spices in a pan. Warm until the butter has melted, then let cool to room temperature. In the meantime, measure the flour, salt, and baking soda in a baking bowl. When the butter-spice-mixture is cool enough, beat it until pale brown, add the egg, and beat one minute more. (I do this using a twirl whisk.)

Pour the mixture into the flour mixture and stir well. Note that the dough is quite soft at this point, but do NOT add more flour. Now, place the dough in the fridge for a couple of hours, or preferably overnight. This will allow for the flavours to develop to their full potential!

When your dough is ready, roll it out on a flour dusted work surface until about 2-3 mm thin. Cut out cookies, using cookie cutters of different shapes. Place your cookies on an oven tray covered with parchment paper.  Bake in a preheated oven (200 C) 6-8 minutes. Note that size matters here: on each tray, place cookies of more or less the same size - otherwise the small ones will burn before the big ones are done.

Out of experience I can already say that gingerbread cookies keep very well several weeks, as long as you store them in an airtight container.

Gingerbread cookies also taste delicious with blue cheese and Port wine..

P.S. Today I happened to find this spice mixture from Herbaria. It's called Ginger&Bread and it has all of the spices you need for gingerbread - I'll try it out for the next batch and tell if it works!