On the first day of Christmas The Pink Whisk sent to me…..Lebkuchen

Happy Christmas Pink Whiskers! Today is the start of The Pink Whisk’s Twelve Days of Christmas. One Christmassy baking idea each day for the next twelve days – a great way to kick start your Christmas Baking! Hopefully you’ll enjoy the recipes, so put your Christmas hat on and get baking.

Ruth
xx

On the first day of Christmas The Pink Whisk sent to me (yes you have to sing it!) Lebkuchen

Ingredients:

85ml honey
115g dark brown sugar
30g butter
225g plain flour, sifted
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 egg, beaten
50g ground almonds

To ice:
25g icing sugar sifted
2 tsp water

Makes 24 biscuits.

In a large pan place the honey, sugar and butter. It does need to be a large pan as we will be making the dough in it. Heat over a gentle flame until the butter and sugar have melted. Remove from the heat.

Sift together the flour, spices and bicarbonate of soda.

Beat the egg in a small dish. (Don’t mix it in a mug – I have lost count of the amount of times I have sipped egg thinking it was my cup of tea!)

Add one half of the flour mixture and half of the egg to the pan and mix well.

Repeat with the remaining flour and egg.

Finally add in the ground almonds and mix till thoroughly combined.

The dough now needs to be chilled, it is very sticky and will seem along way away from being a biscuit dough but don’t worry.

Place it in a plastic bag, an easy way of doing this is to fold a bag over the inside of a large jug and tip the dough in.

Chill overnight in the fridge, in fact you can leave this dough to develop it’s flavours in the fridge for up to three days.

The following day remove the dough from the fridge and roll out between two sheets of greaseproof paper to approx 5mm thick.

Preheat the oven to 160c Fan/180c/Gas Mark 4.

Crack out the christmas cutters, hooray!, and cut out your biscuits. Lay them spaced well apart on a greased or lined baking tray. The biscuits will spread on baking so I have found that 1″ cutters are the best to use.

(There is only one baking tray I have that doesn’t need greasing and is super non-stick, it’s the baking tray in the Tefal Airbake range, for all the others I use the reusable sheets of bake o-glide – even I can’t stick anything to bake-o-glide – I’ve put the links at the end of the post if you’re interested xx)

Bake in the oven for 7-9 minutes until golden brown. Allow to cool for five minutes on the tray to firm up a little before carefully transferring to a cooling rack.

Mix up a really watery icing glaze combining your sifted icing sugar with the water.

Line up the lebkuchen on a wire rack, I cover the work top in a layer of cling film to make cleaning up much easier later on!

Using a pastry brush glaze the tops of the biscuits by brushing on a thin layer of icing. Apply a second coat and leave to dry.

The biscuits will keep for up to three weeks in an airtight container – that’s if you can resist eating them.
Tefal Airbake Cookie Sheet – John Lewis Bake-O-Glide – John Lewis