Christmas cookies, Charity, CheeseBox and Currency

There is so much happening to me these days that I even have to categorize the events)

‘Christmas cookies’ stands for the recipe of amazing crispy honeysweet and spicy ginger cookies you will find in this post.

‘Charity’ stands for the reason I made the cookies and for a gorgeous girl Darya who works within a charity project Centre of equal opportunities Step Up. The cookies were sold at a Christmas charity fair and I really hope they helped to make someone’s life at least a tiny little bit better.

‘CheeseBox’ stands for the project I’d been working on for the last couple of months that we finally launched this week! CheeseBox is a super cosy and ‘with-all-my-heart’ kind of project. We’ve developed home cheese-making kits which allow you to easily and quickly prepare your own cheese right in your kitchen. It is super easy and fun! Plus some of the cheeses we actually don’t HAVE in our supermarkets anymore, so our CheeseBoxes may come in handy in this light, too ;). I’ll be definitely telling you more about the headway of CheeseBox in my upcoming posts. As for now you can visit our website http://www.cheese-box.com and I will really appreciate it if you tell me what you think about it! Unfortunately, the site is only in Russian as for now, but thank God we have GoogleTranslate 😉

‘Currency’ – well, RIP, rouble.  

And now back to the Christmas cookies recipe. It’s only 10 days till Christmas after all! I already have Christmas music playing on the background all the time no matter what I do. But can you blame me? One has to keep the holiday spirit alive even if everything around you is falling apart.

For the cookies you will need:

• 200 g all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 3 tbsp butter
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon orange zest
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
• 100 g brown sugar
• 70 ml honey
• 1 teaspoon vanilla sugar

Mix flour, baking powder, soda, salt and spices (ginger, cinnamon and cloves) in a medium bowl.

In a separate bowl mix butter, brown and vanilla sugar and an egg until smooth. Mix in honey and orange zest.

Gradually add dry ingredients and mix well (you will need to fold the dough with your hands at some point, as it’s going to be quite stiff).

Wrap the dough in plastic and let it sit at a room temperature for a couple of hours.

Preheat your oven to 190ºC.

Roll the dough between 2 pieces of waxed paper, take off the top piece of paper, transfer the bottom piece of paper with the dough onto a tray and cut out the shapes you like (just cut them, don’t try to take them out). Now put the tray into your freezer for 5-10 min. Take it out – and now you can easily remove the cut-out cookies without breaking them. Put the cookies on a baking tray covered with baking paper and cook them for 8-12 min, until slightly brown.

Let the cookies chill and then decorate them any way you like)

Enjoy!