In most wheat-based recipes, gluten strands are formed while you work the dough. If you don't rest the dough, rolling can be more difficult and you may get a tougher texture in the final product.
Additionally, refrigerating the dough up to a certain point will firm up the fats in the recipe butter, etc , which will make the dough less mushy and will making rolling out the dough evenly a bit easier.
Unless the dough is so firm it becomes brittle, refrigeration will make the dough less fragile in most cases. Perhaps less important, the moisture levels may become a bit more consistent throughout the dough as well. I think it really depends on your recipe. I will say it is easier to roll out when chilled but not cold as this recipe is pretty thick due to flour etc. It also makes the dough less sticky.
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Learn more. Why should I rest gingerbread dough? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 1 month ago. Dense, ginger-spiced cookies flavored with molasses or honey date back to the Middle Ages, when intricately carved boards were used as templates to make fanciful shapes. Sold at fairs, these treats became beloved holiday traditions.
Vanessa Greaves. By Vanessa Greaves Updated December 14, Pin FB Share. Credit: Kim. To make sticky gingerbread dough easier to work with, chill it for at least 1 hour before rolling it out. Roll out the dough on a surface that's lightly dusted with flour or a mixture of flour and confectioners' sugar aka powdered sugar. If the dough isn't too sticky, you can roll it out between sheets of parchment paper. Keep cookie cutters from sticking to the dough by misting them very lightly with cooking spray or dipping the edges into flour.
If you're cutting out large or intricate shapes, here's how to keep them from stretching or falling apart when you transfer them to a baking sheet: Roll out the dough on parchment paper, cut the shapes, remove the scraps, and slide the whole sheet of parchment paper directly onto the baking sheet.
Decorating them is as fun as eating them, but if you don't have the right kind of icing, your gingerbread men are going to come out looking more like gingerbread zombies a few years into the apocalypse. For decorating your little gingerbread people, royal icing is a go-to win. A traditional icing that's not the least bit like the frosting you might usually expect to use on cookies, this easy-to-make recipe only calls for egg whites, icing sugar, glycerin, and lemon juice.
You can check out Mary Berry's recipe here. If you're not thrilled about the idea of using raw egg in an uncooked product, look for or make your own pasteurized eggs. If you want to make your cookies a little different, you can also add some food coloring , but the pure white of this icing is what makes it so traditional.
Royal icing has another advantage, too. Since it dries hard, it won't rub off on other cookies or turn into a goopy mess. If you're using it to decorate a gingerbread house, it's not going to run like other types of icing might. If your home gets a little chaotic during the holidays, the idea of leaving your gingerbread house out on a table might be a little scary. They can take hours to build, after all, and you definitely don't want the whole thing knocked down with a single bump.
According to Erica Kahn of the Brown University School of Engineering which holds a yearly gingerbread house contest , using icing to hold your gingerbread together is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. What do the professionals use?
She recommends melting caramel, gummy bears and marshmallow to create a sugary cement. When some folks at NPR tried it, they found that they could drop their gingerbread house several feet without breaking. The engineering department at Johns Hopkins also weighed in, and suggested that one crucial part of gingerbread house-building that's often overlooked is making sure everything is cut out properly. Check and double-check to make sure all your corners are perfectly square, which all goes back to making sure you're using the right kinds of tools to cut your gingerbread.
Scour the internet for gingerbread recipes and you'll find a whole bunch of very similar ideas on how to make the perfect gingerbread. Most are a very 21st-century take on what's really an old favorite, and if you love gingerbread you're doing yourself a huge disservice if you don't try some of the old recipes at least once. Gingerbread dates back to at least the 15th century. Spices were insanely expensive, so it was probably quite the treat.
For one of the oldest recipes out there, check out this one from Gode Cookery. This medieval recipe came from a 19th-century cookbook that used two 15th-century manuscripts as its sources.
The recipe calls for bread crumbs, honey, and pepper. Strangely, the ginger is optional. It's nothing like today's gingerbread, but if you want to be able to serve something truly unique for Christmas, this candy-like, bread-based dessert can be a massive hit.
If you're looking for something more modern, Colonial Williamsburg suggests this recipe from a cookbook. By now, it's starting to sound a little more familiar with flour, sugar, butter, treacle, cream, and, of course, ginger and nutmeg.
And what about trying something with a pretty impressive pedigree? According to to the story, Mother Washington once served it to the Marquis de Lafayette, and he was such a fan that it's now known as Lafayette Gingerbread.
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