Guest Blogger - Mandi's Easter Gingerbread

Earlier on in the week I featured as a guest blogger on Mandi's blog 'Poppy Fox at Home', now its time to feature a recipe post from Mandi.  The blogging community is full of generous people happy to share and show mutual appreciation....it makes me feel all warm inside.  Over to you Mandi...

An Easter Crafternoon

I'm honored to be a guest blogger on Make.Do.Sew today.  Hi, I'm Mandi (Aka Mummafox) and I write a blog called PoppyFoxatHome which is a blog about living the simple life, motherhood, my two little people and my handmade creations.  I'm an Expressive therapies counsellor, at home mum, a social worker in a previous life and owner of PoppyFox so it's a great honour to write today's post.

Being Easter our crafternoons are filled with baking, painting and craft.  It encapsulates our tribes effort to live the simple life and enjoy the art of handmade.  Instead of giving eggs as gifts we decided to bake Easter themed gingerbread and DIY our own gift tags and wrapping for gifts using what we already had at home.

Gingerbread was one of the first recipes I shared with my daughter.  Entertaining Miss 3 with a 12 week old has it's challenges so for Easter I wanted to create a week of activities.  Making art collages at Mother's group, sewing fabric bunny headbands, painting and dying eggs, making gingerbread presents and bunny calico bags for the egg hunt.

I thought I'd share my recipe for Easter Gingerbread and Easter craft with you all today.  It's a great recipe for those that don't like traditional gingerbread as it cooks softer and more like a gingerbread cake in a cookie so kids seem to like it.

Part 1 - For the Cookies

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup of light molasses, golden syrup or honey
• 1/2 cup of firmly packed brown sugar
• 2 tblsp unsalted butter
• 2 1/2 cups plain flour
• 2 tsp of ground ginger
• pinch of cinnamon
• pinch of ground cloves
• pinch of ground cardamom
• 1 tsp of baking soda
• 1 tsp of tepid water

How to Make

• Preheat oven to 160 degrees.
• Line baking paper sheets on baking trays.
• In a mixing bowl add butter and sugar and blend until smooth and creamy.
• Combine flour, the cinnamon, ginger, ground cloves and ground cardamom in a mixing bowl. Add the golden syrup and stir to combine.
• Dissolve baking powder in tsp of tepid water and add to flour mixture.
• Refrigerate dough for half an hour which helps with rolling it out later on.
• 30 minutes later take dough out of the fridge.  Roll dough between two baking paper sheets (this saves mess and flouring the bench top) to a thickness of 12mm.
• Using cookie cutters cut shapes out of dough and place on prepared baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes. 10 mins gingerbread are pale gold, 12 mins golden in colour.
• Allow to cool on baking trays for 5 mins, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.  Cookies can be stored in airtight container for up to a week.

 

Crafty DIY - If you want to make them for gifts

Part 2

You'll need icing pens and decoration balls,sprinkles or powder coated mini chocolate drops. These are available in the baking section of your supermarket or any cake decorating shop.

How to Do

Using the pens decorate your cookies with icing and add decorations to give cookies some colour and personality.

Miss 3 loved spending time decorating each cookie and I helped with the icing when she needed a little help.

Leave cookies on a wire rack and let dry while your doing craft.

Part 3 - Crafternoon activity

You'll need-

• Water based paints
• Coloured paper or white paper
• Paint brushes + water jar
• A pair of scissors
• Small plastic bags or clear plastic pockets
• String
• Big Sticker dots (optional)
• Black marker/Sharpie pen

 

How to Do

• Get your little one to paint a colourful picture on the paper using lines, dots and shapes covering much of the page.
• Paint 3-4 pages as these will be the backing in your gift bags and shape the rabbit heads you'll use as a decoration and gift tag.
• Cut a rectangle piece of painted paper and place in the gift bags.  You'll want it to come two quarters of the way in the bag as a backdrop to the cookies.
• Place decorated and undecorated cookies in the bag with the decorated cookies at the front.  I put 6-8 cookies in each bag with at least 2 decorated cookies at the front.
• Let the paper dry fully before drawing rabbit heads on the painted piece of paper.  Depending on how many gifts you are creating you'll want two rabbits per bag.  One for decoration and one as a gift tag.
• Using a coloured Sharpie marker pen draw an outline of a rabbit's head and face.  Using scissors cut out the head and place inside in the corner of your gift bag.
• Using string tie the gift bag up and secure with a knot or bow with another rabbit as a gift tag.  Place a whole in the gift tag to aid you attaching it to your gift bag of gingerbread.

I used a neon pink coloured dot for the back of the gift tag to write a message on.  This was placed on the back of the gift tag easily and kept things simple.  I had a gift bag and plastic gift pockets so I had gift bags tied with a bow and gift packets wrapped as a present with string for gifts.  The trick is to use what you have and be versatile.  No two bags look the same and I liked that.

Then a you have left to do is give your handmade gifts to those lucky people.  Miss 3 loves being the gift giver and it's a great way to help teach them to share and give.

I'd love for you to come visit my blog at www.poppyfoxathome.com, or over at Instagram @thepoppyfox and take a look.  I'm busy opening up my Etsy shop over Easter which is exciting, sewing up some PoppyFox orders and will be doing a giveaway shortly so stay posted.  I'd love to hear from you!

Thanks for having me Lou. Xx

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