Gingerbread persons with a frosty glaze. If you really think about it they should be called molasses bread cookies, but ginger is the traditional ingredient we put forward verbally. The molasses, with its melancholy flavor, is combined with a rush of pure sugar for the frosting, and they look like thin slices of chocolate stored in an igloo.
Use a stand mixer to prepare the dough; it will be too much exertion otherwise. Cream together 1 cup each of butter and brown sugar with 1 ½ teaspoons each of salt and allspice, and the Christmas spices: 2 teaspoons each of ginger and cinnamon, and 1 teaspoon of cloves. Pour in 1 cup of molasses and an egg, then gradually mix in 23 ¼ ounces of flour. Wrap and in plastic and refrigerate overnight.
To make the persons, roll out the dough and use the cookie cutters of your choice. Bake at 350 for 8 minutes, then let them rest on the baking sheet until they go from soft to firm (which means you finish the cooking out of the oven, a technique I’ve never tried with cookies but which works well for these), and cool on a plate. Prepare the glaze by mixing 14 ounces of sifted confectioner’s sugar with 6 tablespoons of milk and 3 tablespoons of pasteurized egg white, “until the glaze is the consistency of molasses.” Add 1 teaspoon vanilla and dip each cookie in the glaze one by one, pressing them on parchment paper to remove excess frosting. You will need to wait a few hours for the glaze to dry, but in the meantime you can use raisins to make faces or other expressive designs. In their multifaceted sweetness it feels like eating more than one is too much, which is how Christmas cookies should be.
(Photo: Brookside Gardens, winter. Recipe is from The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion.)
365 Days of Food 