Irish Style Gingerbread Men: Every Old Bakery's Favourite

Looking to beat the January blues? Have a jolly little gingerbread man, made with what is to become my go-to recipe!

The gingerbread man of my childhood... a biscuit soft enough to yield easily to a single bite, with a delicious bendy chewiness and a clean, pure flavour of golden syrup and ground ginger, all topped off with naff-as-hell cooking chocolate and sweets to decorate. This style of gingerbread man is ubiquitous in Ireland, appearing in every bakery around the country from small towns to cities. It's like they all have a recipe that was taught to them in culinary college, but in all the nearly 7 years I've been blogging, I've never quite captured it.

Over the course of my blog, I have done a few different recipes for gingerbread:

• Right back at the very start I had my recipe free from dairy, gluten, and egg which I made for my friend who was intolerant to all of the above;
• I had my Dinosaur Kimberley recipe, which was essentially a regular roll out biscuit dough with some spice and golden syrup for flavour;
• I then did an egg-free gingerbread recipe, which was essentially ginger flavoured shortbread;
• After that, there was the gingerbread skeletons recipe which was my first attempt at the kind of chewy bakery style gingerbread that I love, but wasn't quite there yet;
• And most recently my Gingerbread Village Cake, which featured a cakier style that's suitable for building houses but still nice to eat.

As you can see, I've never really had a go to recipe. Mostly because all the recipes I used didn't produce a gingerbread that I really liked; they were either to dry and crunchy, too sturdy and shortbready, too cakey, or too soft and squishy. None of the recipes I've used have that X-factor that I wanted.

(Credit: the Daily Express)

Until now! From my trawling of the internet, I found a recipe that is pretty much bang on that delicious flavour of my childhood (and adulthood, admittedly: I cannot resist the charms of a pretty little gingerbread man when I pass my local bakery). Shared to the RTÉ website is a recipe for Nanny Nellie's gingerbread men, and whoever Nanny Nellie is she most likely got that secret recipe because it makes a gingerbread man almost identical to any you'd find in a bakery.

INGREDIMENTS

Makes 24 gingerbread men

12 ounces (340 grammes) plain white flour: spelt, wheat, or gluten-free

1 to 2 tablespoons (15 to 30 millilitres) ground ginger, depending on how spicy you want it

1 teaspoon (5 millilitres) bicarbonate of soda

4 ounces (115 grammes) salted butter, or margarine for an authentic experience

6 ounces (170 grammes) soft light brown sugar

3 ounces (85 grammes) golden syrup

1 medium egg

Up to 1 tablespoon (15 millilitres) water, to adjust

Optional: other ground spices to taste, for example cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, etc.

To decorate

1 bar (150 grammes) milk cooking chocolate

Sweets such as Smarties, M&Ms, or Jelly Tots

METHOD

• Preheat the oven to 180C (350F) and line one or two baking sheets with non-stick paper.
• Sieve the dry ingredients together onto a sheet of non-stick paper, or into a roomy mixing bowl. Set aside.
• In a mixing bowl, beat together the butter, sugar and syrup with an electric mixer until well combined. Beat in the egg.
• Add the dry ingredients bit by bit until the mixer can no longer mix, then turn the mixture out onto a lightly floured work surface and bring the dough together by hand.
• Depending on your egg, you might need to add a little water to help the dough come together, which is perfectly normal. The dough should be soft, but not at all sticky.
• This dough can be used immediately and doesn't need chilling: roll out to a thickness of an eighth inch (3 millilmetres) on a well floured surface, making sure to move it around every so often to prevent sticking.
• Cut out shapes and arrange them about an inch (2.5 centimetres) apart on the tray(s). The scraps re-roll very well.
• Bake in the preheated oven for 7 to 9 minutes, or until they look set. They will still be a little soft, but the edges will be set nicely. Don't let them brown too much!
• Allow to cool on the trays momentarily before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
• To decorate, melt the chocolate according to the instructions. Dip the gingerbread man heads and feet in the chocolate, and attach the sweets with chocolate to look like buttons. Draw smiley faces on with melted chocolate using a cocktail stick.

Adapted from: https://www.rte.ie/lifestyle/recipes/2018/1107/1009352-nanny-nellies-gingerbread-men-today/