Soft gingerbread and crisp gingerbread come out of the same bowl of dough, and the difference is three or four minutes in a 350°F (175°C) oven. Eight to 9 minutes leaves the middles tender with a little bend, 11 to 12 gives you cookies that snap and hang well on a tree. What keeps the gingerbread men looking like gingerbread men, either way, is cold dough, a 10-minute spell in the freezer after cutting, and only ½ teaspoon of baking soda. This batch makes 36 cookies with 3 in (7 to 8 cm) cutters, and below is what to use if you’re out of molasses, which icing actually sets hard, and why this dough isn’t the one for a gingerbread house.
Gingerbread cookies at a glance
How do you make gingerbread cookies? Beat ¾ cup (170 g) butter with ⅔ cup (150 g) brown sugar, add ½ cup (170 g) molasses and an egg, then mix in 3½ cups (440 g) flour with ginger, cinnamon, cloves and ½ tsp baking soda. Chill 2 hours, roll 3/16 in (5 mm) thick, cut, freeze the shapes 10 minutes and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 8 to 9 minutes for soft cookies or 11 to 12 for crisp. 195 minutes for 36 servings.
- Yield. About 36 cookies with 3 in (7 to 8 cm) cutters. Bigger cutters give fewer cookies and need 1 or 2 minutes more.
- Time. About 3¼ hours start to finish, but only around 45 minutes of it is hands-on. The rest is the fridge and three batches in the oven.
- Skill. Easy. The one judgment call is when to pull them, because dark dough doesn’t show browning.
- Flavor. Molasses-dark, cinnamon and clove up front, a warm ginger finish that kids generally like.
If what you’re after is a pale butter cookie for colorful icing, that’s a different dough: the Christmas butter cookies that hold their shape have no spices or leavening at all.
What you need, and what to swap
| Ingredient | Metric | US | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| All-purpose flour | 440 g | 3½ cups | UK plain flour; not self-rising |
| Unsalted butter | 170 g | ¾ cup (1½ sticks) | Salted works: drop the added salt |
| Brown sugar | 150 g | ⅔ cup packed | Light or dark both work |
| Molasses | 170 g | ½ cup | Unsulphured “original” or “mild”, never blackstrap alone |
| Egg | 1 large | 1 large | Room temperature, so the butter doesn’t seize |
| Ground ginger | 5 g | 1 tbsp | Drop to 2 tsp for a milder cookie |
| Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg | 5 g, 0.5 g, 0.5 g | 2 tsp, ¼ tsp, ¼ tsp | No nutmeg: add ¼ tsp more cinnamon |
| Baking soda | 2.5 g | ½ tsp | Don’t swap for baking powder: soda is what reacts with the molasses |
A ½ cup of molasses weighs about 6 oz (170 g); if it’s sticky to measure, grease the cup first and it slides out.
Molasses and what to use instead
Molasses is what gives gingerbread its color, its slightly bitter edge and its tender bite. In US stores it sits in the baking aisle; pick the regular kind. Blackstrap is so bitter on its own that the cookies taste burnt.
| Swap | Amount | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Black treacle (UK) | Same weight, 170 g | Darker and a touch more bitter; the closest UK match |
| Golden syrup (UK) | Same weight | Much paler and milder, more like a ginger biscuit than gingerbread |
| Honey | Same weight | Paler, softer and honey-flavored; browns faster, so check from minute 7. Not for babies under 12 months, even baked |
| Maple syrup | Same weight | Lighter in color, thinner dough that needs the full chill |
| Piloncillo syrup | Same weight, recipe below | Caramel flavor, less bitterness, medium-brown color, firmer dough |
Piloncillo syrup. Piloncillo is unrefined cane sugar sold in cones in Latin American stores and in the Hispanic aisle (panela in Colombia, papelón in Venezuela). Grate 150 g (5¼ oz) of it into a small pan with 75 ml (5 tbsp) water, stir over medium heat until fully dissolved, about 5 minutes, then let it boil 2 minutes without stirring. You’ll get about 180 g of honey-thick syrup; let it cool completely and use 170 g. Warm syrup melts the butter and the cookies spread. The same syrup is the base of Venezuelan catalinas, Venezuela’s soft spiced cookie.
Fresh ginger
Grated fresh ginger doesn’t replace ground in this dough. It adds moisture and a sharper, fresher bite. If you like it, add 1 tsp fresh on top of the ground ginger.
Equipment. A mixer (a wooden spoon works if the butter is soft), two baking sheets, parchment, a rolling pin, cutters and a wire rack. No cutters? Draw a shape on card, cut it out, lay it on the dough and trace around it with a small knife.
A make-ahead plan for the holidays
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Up to 1 month ahead | Make the dough, wrap the disks well and freeze |
| The night before baking | Move frozen dough to the fridge, or make it fresh (good for 3 days) |
| Baking day | Roll, cut, freeze 10 minutes, bake: about 45 minutes of oven and sheet shuffling |
| Next day | Ice and decorate |
| That night | Let royal icing dry 8 hours before stacking or bagging |
Baked, undecorated cookies also freeze for up to 3 months, so you can bake weeks ahead and ice closer to the day.
How to make gingerbread cookies
Mixing
Use butter that’s soft enough to dent with a finger but not shiny or greasy. Beat it with the sugar for 2 minutes, until creamy, and no longer: beating until pale and fluffy whips in more air, and airy dough tends to spread more. When the molasses and egg go in, the mixture may look broken; the flour fixes it. Stop mixing as soon as the last streak of flour disappears. The dough will feel like soft modeling clay and stick to your fingers. Don’t add flour to fix that. The fridge does.
Chilling
At least 2 hours, as flat ¾ in (2 cm) disks rather than a ball, so they chill quickly and evenly. After an overnight chill, let a disk sit 10 to 15 minutes until it bends without cracking.
Rolling and cutting
Roll between two sheets of parchment so you need no extra flour and the scraps stay tender. For an even 3/16 in (5 mm), set two paint stirrers or rulers of that thickness on either side and roll over them.
At 5 mm the cookies are sturdy enough to ice and hang. Rolled thinner, to ⅛ in (3 mm), they bake crisper but snap during decorating and go from done to overdone fast, so start checking at 6 minutes. If the dough softens while you cut, slide the whole sheet of parchment into the fridge for 10 minutes. For fiddly shapes, chill the cut sheet and peel the scraps away from around them.
Baking soft or crisp
Bake straight from the freezer, one sheet at a time, middle rack, 350°F (175°C).
| You want | Time at 3/16 in (5 mm) | How they look |
|---|---|---|
| Soft, with a slight bend | 8 to 9 minutes | Edges set, centers matte with no wet shine, a light fingerprint stays when pressed |
| Crisp, with a snap | 11 to 12 minutes | Firm all over, edges a shade darker |
Both kinds feel softer out of the oven than they’ll end up, because they firm as they cool. Let them sit on the sheet 5 minutes before moving them. To hang them, poke a hole with a straw before baking and push the straw through again while they’re still warm.
When gingerbread spreads, puffs or turns hard
- Lost their shape. Warm dough, shapes that skipped the 10 minutes in the freezer, or a sheet still hot from the last batch. Rotate two sheets, or let one cool completely before the next batch.
- Puffed up like cake. Most likely more than ½ tsp (2.5 g) baking soda; level the measuring spoon.
- Rock hard. Overbaked, too much flour on the counter, or scraps rerolled too many times. Roll between parchment and reroll scraps once or twice at most.
- Bitter. Blackstrap molasses or a few minutes too long in the oven.
- Pale. Honey, golden syrup or piloncillo syrup instead of molasses. They taste good; they just don’t look as dark.
- Crisp ones went soft. Humidity, or a tin shared with soft cookies. Store them apart.
Icing that sets hard
For icing that dries hard enough to stack and bag, you want royal icing: powdered sugar (UK icing sugar) beaten with meringue powder or pasteurized egg whites. It’s dry to the touch in 1 to 2 hours and fully set in about 8 hours. A simple glaze of powdered sugar and milk is easier, but stays soft underneath and smudges when the cookies touch.
Quantities, outline and flood consistencies, and decorating without a piping bag are all covered in the royal icing section of the Christmas butter cookies. Gingerbread men usually get just lines, buttons and eyes, so half that batch is enough. White on dark gingerbread needs no coloring at all.
Royal icing made with raw shell-egg whites is uncooked egg. Use meringue powder or pasteurized whites when small children, pregnant guests or older relatives will eat the cookies, and only ice cookies that are completely cold.
Baking gingerbread with kids
Make and roll the dough the day before, so the kids arrive to the fun part. Little ones can press raisins, chocolate chips or coarse sugar into the raw shapes as buttons and eyes, which skips icing altogether; older kids can pipe royal icing from a zip-top bag with a 1 to 2 mm corner snipped off. The oven and hot sheets stay with an adult, and the raw dough isn’t for tasting, since it contains raw flour and egg. If you swapped in honey, remember honey isn’t for babies under 12 months, baked or not.
Allergens. Wheat (gluten), egg and dairy (butter). Check sprinkles and chips for nut warnings.
Will this dough work for a gingerbread house?
Not for a real house, no. This is eating gingerbread, with plenty of butter and molasses, so large walls bow as they bake and soften with humidity within days. Houses use a construction dough with more flour and less butter, molasses and soda, which bakes harder and tastes plainer.
What this dough does well is small decorative pieces, not walls that have to stand up: a stacked star tree in graduated 2 to 4 in (5 to 10 cm) stars glued with royal icing, or flat 5 mm figures baked the full 11 to 12 minutes to stand against a plate or hang.
Storing and gifting
- Plain cookies: up to 2 weeks in an airtight tin at room temperature. Soft ones firm up over the days; crisp ones soften in humid kitchens.
- Iced with royal icing: once fully dry, about 10 days in a tin with parchment between layers.
- Raw dough: 3 days in the fridge, up to 1 month in the freezer. Thaw overnight in the fridge.
- Baked, uniced: up to 3 months frozen with parchment between layers; let them come to room temperature in the closed container before icing.
- Iced cookies: don’t freeze them. The icing sweats and colors bleed as they thaw.
Thirty-six cookies make seven cellophane bags of five, tied with ribbon, plus one for the baker. Crisp cookies travel better; soft ones are happier in a tin. For a bigger holiday box they sit nicely next to a homemade panettone, and on the night itself they go well with a mug of Mexican café de olla, Colombian hot chocolate or a pot of Mexican Christmas punch.
Gingerbread cookie questions
Can I make the dough without a mixer? Yes. With soft butter, a wooden spoon and a few minutes of stirring get the butter and sugar creamy, and the flour mixes in by hand.
My cookies went hard in the tin. Can I soften them? Put a slice of sandwich bread in the tin for 24 hours. The cookies pick up its moisture; take the bread out afterward before it goes moldy.
Can I use white sugar instead of brown? Yes, the same 150 g (⅔ cup). The cookies come out a little lighter and crisper, and the molasses still gives them color.
Gingerbread cookie nutrition
Per cookie, 3 in (7 to 8 cm), of the 36 in the batch, without icing, worked out ingredient by ingredient with molasses:
- Calories: 111 kcal
- Protein: 2 g
- Carbohydrates: 17 g
- Fat: 4 g, of which 2 g saturated
- Fiber: 0 g
- Sugars: 8 g
- Sodium: 56 mg
A full coat of royal icing adds roughly 45 kcal per cookie; lines and buttons add much less.
At home I make these with papelón syrup more often than molasses, because that’s what’s in my pantry and I like the caramel note. I save the molasses for when I want really dark gingerbread men so the white icing stands out. And mine come out at 9 minutes: I like them soft, and if a few firm up in the tin, they still get eaten. Josnaisis.