And I had but one penny in the world. Thou should’st have it to buy gingerbread.
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost

Spices are the most essential for the tastes and smells of these winter joys. While the cookies are known as ginger cookies or ginger breads, the distinctive aroma is given by cardamon and clove. There is no cozy winter afternoon without crunchy sweet bites of cookies with your tea of choice.

Ginger Bells
125 g butter
5 tbsp cream
3 tbsp of black treacle or liquid honey
150 g cane or brown sugar
1 tbsp freshly grated (or extremely finely chopped) ginger
1 tbsp grated orange peel
1 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1.5 tsp ground cardamon
400 g white flour
0.5 tsp baking powder
optional:
1 tsp chili powder
1 tbsp grated lemon zest instead of orange peel

for glaze: sugar powder and lemon juice

Combine butter, cream, sugar and the spices you want into sauce pan. Heat it slowly until the the butter and sugar melts. While its melting, sift the flour and baking powder into a large bowl. In this way flour will get more air so the dough will raise better. Then, add the butter mixture slowly into sifted flour and knead thoroughly. Shape it into a ball, wrap into food wrap film and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. You can keep the dough in the fridge longer, even for two days if needed, but not more.
If the dough was in the fridge for more that one over it will need some time to get the room temperature. Lightly dust the work surface with flour. Start kneading the dough and when it gets soft roll out the dough. Its hard to roll out a large surface because the dough cracks very easily. Optimal thickness for cookies is not more than 4 mm.
Now use your cookie shapes to cut the cookies out. Place them on baking paper and bake for around 10 min in 150°C heat oven. The cookies should become nicely brown, but not too dark.
Let them cool down and decorate if you feel like it. For glaze just mix sugar powder with lemon juice and use you imagination!

Crunch crunch…