I make Gingerbread Men for the shop at Union Market every Christmas Eve. I tend to stay up way too late the night before but it’s so worth it-especially when Daniel helps decorate and carols play in the background. It’s our one tradition we’ve done for several years now. I went through a lot of recipes looking for the perfect soft gingerbread. After several batches of hard and dry cookies, I found a great recipe! You can find the original Here.

Since I make several batches; decorating all of them can take forever! I cheat and just dust them with powdered sugar or (gasp) buy the ready-made frosting in a tube. It’s practically a “kitchen crime”, because we all know homemade is 5x better but when it comes to saving time, I think it’s worth it.

Super soft gingerbread cookies
Ingredients
Wet Ingredients:
1½ cups dark molasses
1 cup dark brown sugar
⅓ cup butter
⅔ cup cold water
Dry Ingredients:
6 cups flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp allspice
2 tsp ginger
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt

I know this isn’t gingerbread but not everybody gets Christmas Cookies from The White House. 🙂

Instructions
Start by making the cookie dough the night before you’ll be baking them. Cream the butter and the sugar together.
Now mix all the rest of wet the ingredients in with them together.
Using a whisk, sift all of the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients.
Cover and refrigerate overnight.
When you are ready to start rolling out the dough the next day, flour the surface really well. You can also use a silpat for rolling out the cookie dough. Before beginning to roll out the cookie dough, preheat your oven to 350. Roll the dough out to ¼″ thickness and cut with cookie cutters into shapes.
Place cookies on parchment paper on a cookie sheet and bake at 350 for approx. 10-11 minutes. Let cookies rest on the pan for another 5 minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.

Tip: I make my dough up to 3 days ahead so all I have to do it roll them out and bake them the day before. Enjoy!