Third Culture Kitchen

Approx. 100 pieces

Just the recipe: Gingerbread Paraisten Piparkakut [PDF]

This is a Finnish gingerbread recipe. It’s been in my family for a long time, and it’s delicious. The two key ingredients from an international cooking point of view are the butter and the syrup. The butter must become very hard in the refrigerator, and the syrup should be light baking syrup made from beets. Molasses can be substituted, but doesn’t taste as good.

250 g European-style butter
200 g sugar (2 ¼ dl = 225 ml)
an egg
100 g syrup (3/4 dl = 75 ml)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground dried orange peel
1 ½ tsp baking soda
400 g white wheat flour (6 dl = 600ml = 0.6l)

Measure out the ingredients. Put the syrup and the spices in a pan, let it boil briefly, and then let it cool down. Mix the baking soda with the flour. Mix the butter and the sugar to make an airy whip. Add the cool syrup-spice mixture and the egg into the butter-sugar whip while mixing vigorously. Last, add the flour mixture. Knead into an even dough. Refrigerate the dough overnight.

The next day, take a small piece of the dough out of the refrigerator at a time.

The dough, a rolling pin, gingerbread cutters, and a piece of dough.

Roll out each piece out to about 2 mm thickness. Make sure the baking surface and the rolling pin are covered with flour. The dough is very sticky. If a piece of dough becomes so soft that it starts sticking to everything, put it back in the refrigerator to harden and work with another piece. Because you need to use so much flour on the table and rolling pin, the dough will eventually stop sticking together. You can only roll one piece of dough out a few times. When it won’t stick together anymore, you can eat it if you country’s salmonella infection rates are low. (Yummy!) If you might get sick from raw eggs where you live, just throw it away.

Almost done rolling it out!

Make the cookies with gingerbread cutters. Traditional shapes are men, women, stars, hearts, Christmas trees, and goats. Goats are traditional only in the Nordic countries, where the Christmas Goat used to bring presents for children. Goats made out of bundled straw are still used as Christmas decorations.

Peel away the dough between the cookies. If you didn’t use enough flour on the table and the cookies stick to the table, a spatula or knife can help getting them off the table. However, you will probably squish the cookies at least a little. If you used enough flour, they should come off the table easily, often lifting off the table inside the gingerbread cutter. The snow man shape is newer than the stars, hearts, trees and man.

Bake the gingerbread cookies in 200°C around 3 minutes. I tried 425°F in the States, and it worked fine. Be careful – they burn very quickly because they’re so thin.

These gingerbread are not done yet. They’re too pale. They’ve been in the oven about a minute. The peace dove shape is also new.

These gingerbread are done. If they had been left in the oven just a little longer, they would have burned.

Gingerbread are eaten on their own, but they are also eaten with glögg, glühwein/vin chaud. Glögg is Swedish mulled wine. Glühwein means literally ‘glowing wine’ in German and is called vin chaud, literally hot wine, in French. Continental European mulled wine recipes have fewer spices and lemon peel, whereas glögg adds vodka to the wine and has more spices but no lemon peel.