Try our recipe gingerbread cookie recipe a sticky gingerbread cake or cute gingerbread men. This easy recipe for gingerbread men makes great Christmas presents or decorations – perfect for baking with children.

Gingerbread biscuits can be stored in an airtight container for up to two weeks. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our approach to external linking. The origins of gingerbread date to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. After arriving in Europe in the 11th century, it took many popular forms. Barbara Rolek is a former chef who became a cooking school instructor and award-winning food writer.

Gingerbread and the shapes it takes have a long history. And I had but one penny in the world, thou should’st have it to buy gingerbread. An early European recipe for gingerbread consisted of ground almonds, stale breadcrumbs, rosewater, sugar and, naturally, ginger. The resultant paste was pressed into wooden molds. In the 16th century, the English replaced the breadcrumbs with flour, and added eggs and sweeteners, resulting in a lighter product. On a more practical note, before refrigeration was a twinkle in someone’s eye, aromatic crumbled gingerbread was added to recipes to mask the odor of decaying meat. Gingerbread is a baked sweet containing ginger and sometimes cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom and anise, and sweetened with any combination of brown sugar, molasses, light or dark corn syrup, or honey.

The third form gingerbread takes today is a house-shaped confection made with a variation of gingerbread cookie dough. Gingerbread is considered an art form in Nuremberg, Ulm, and Pulsnitz in Germany, Torun in Poland, Tula in Russia, Pest in Hungary, Pardubice and Prague in the Czech Republic, and Lyon in France where gingerbread baking guilds were sanctioned by the government starting in the Middle Ages. Vast antique mold collections are displayed in the Torun and Ulm museums, and some are used to make beeswax Christmas ornaments that are in great demand. The gingerbread house became popular in Germany after the Brothers Grimm published their fairy tale collection which included “Hansel and Gretel” in the 19th century.