Christmas Time

Christmas is my favorite time of the year. It's the time when the whole house smells of gingerbread and spruce. In the morning on the 24th of December my dad shops for a fresh Christmas tree, mom makes pierogis and borsch in the kitchen (pierogis with cabbage and mushrooms are traditional Polish Christmas dishes) and me and my sister bake cookies. Then there is time to decorate the tree. And when the first star shows on the sky we have Christmas dinner with twelve dishes. Before we start we share a Christmas wafer and wish each other good health, happiness and good life.

For Christmas, I usually bake poppy seed roll, cheesecake, gingerbread cake and lots of different cookies. And my mom also boils, yes boils babka (cake) from an old family traditional recipe. She is pro in making boiled babka :)

I'm still in the stage of discovering Canadian products and looking for ingredients to make traditional recipes that I brought from home. This year baking is not as festive as previous years but I ended up making ginger bread cookies.

2 cups flour
1 tablespoon cocoa
2 tablespoons honey
2/3 cups sugar
1,5 teaspoon baking soda
1 teasppon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger powder
1 teasponn ground clove
half tespoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon butter
1 egg
1/3 cup warm milk

Mix all ingredients together (add egg and milk at the end) and knead the dough. Roll the dough 5 mm thick and use cookie cutters to cut out christmas shapes. Whatever leftover dough roll out again and cut out more cookies. Bake cookies in 180 Celsius degrees for about 15-20 minutes. When they cool you can decorate them, use icing or melted chocolate, anything you want :)

Gingerbread cookies are soft right after taking them out from the oven, later they get hard but if you put them in a plastic bag for couple days they will get softer again. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!

Recipe inspiration from Kwestia Smaku.