Pepparkakor

Last year I started a personal tradition of punishing myself by baking some hundreds of the ginger bread cookies.
This year of course, I had to respect such new tradition and I started by doing them for our other new tradition, the Christmas dinner with our friends.
Unfortunately, I need to improve in taking pictures. Sorry for that.

Here there is my recipe:

 Plan the gingerbread in advance, since it has to rest in the fridge for at least one day.
Ingredients for about 300 gingerbreads:
300g butter
5dl sugar
1dl light syrup
1 spoon of ground ginger
1 spoon of ground clove
1 spoon of ground cinnamon
2 tea spoons of ground cardamom
1 spoon of bicarbonate
2 dl vatten
15 dl flour

 Take the butter at room temperature and mix it with the sugar and the syrup. Create an homogeneous dough.

 Pour down all the spices (I usually grind most of them myself, it tastes much better!) and the bicarbonate and keep mixing.

 Add the water and at the end the flour. I add both gradually. If you use an electric device, you are done. Otherwise you need to work the dough on some surface and make it looks homogeneous and with a quite compact consistency.

 You need then to put some plastic wrap or some aluminum foil around it and let it rest in the fridge. I think that if it remains in the fridge a couple of days more the taste will be even better.

 Take out a bit at the time of the dough, cover your baking board with flour and the rolling pin and start to stretch the dough over the surface. I have a little bit of water on the side in case the dough is too dry. If it is too soft I add a bit of flour.
The dough should be quite thin, that is the hardest part :-)

 Choose your favorite molds  (these years I added new animals to the lonely cats) and create the shapes for the cookies. Prepare an oven plate with some baking paper and put the cookies on top.
Warm up the oven to 200-225 °C.
If you don't have the baking paper you can put butter on the plate. But then it is harder to clean!

Let the cookies be in the oven for 4-5 minutes (if they are quite thin, otherwise around 7 if they are a bit thicker). Nevertheless, until they look golden-brown.
Take them out of the oven and let them rest. They will be a bit soft at first but they will become harder with time.
You can preserve them in boxes for 1-2 months at room temperature or chillier. You can also freeze them and keep them for 3-6 months.