Gingerbread for Cookies & Houses (GFCF) December 3, 2007
Posted by Karen Joy in Celiac Disease, Christmas, Cooking/Baking/Food/Recipes, Dairy-free, GF Recipes, GFCF Recipes, Gluten-Free and Food Allergy Resources.trackback
This is a sturdy, versatile dough that is just right for gingerbread cookies — either crispy or chewy — and for the walls and roof of your allergen-free, gluten-free, casein-free gingerbread house. The cookies are not super-sweet, so they work well for icing. (I used royal icing for the gingerbread house; many recipes can be found online.)
Unless you’re making a gingerbread cottage, you’ll need at least half of the dough to make a house. Use the rest to make an assortment of rolled out, decorated cookies. (I used Bob Vila’s Colonial House template and instructions, and it took just over half of the dough. Well, technically, since I doubled the below recipe, and the house took just over one quarter of the dough.)
If the recipe looks slightly familiar, that is because I altered it from another recipe I posted on this blog, the always-popular Big Batch Gluten-Free Christmas/Sugar Cookies.
This recipe does freeze very well. Thaw in the fridge, then bring to room temp before rolling.
Click here for pics of the house my kids and I made with this recipe.
GFCF Gingerbread Cookies
Makes about 8 dozen medium-sized cutout cookies
- 1 cup amaranth flour
- 2 cups potato starch
- 2 cups sweet rice flour
- 4 cups brown rice flour
- 2 Tbsp xanthan gum
- 3 Tbsp baking powder
- 3 Tbsp potato flour (optional)
- 2 Tbsp ground ginger (or more, if you like ‘em really gingery)
- 1 Tbsp ground allspice
- 1 Tbsp ground cinnamon
- 1 1/2 tsp ground cloves
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- 2 cups dark brown sugar
- 2 cups shortening
- 1 cup eggs (depending on size, 4-5 eggs. Measure into a glass measuring cup.)
- 1/2 cup + 2 Tbsp dark molasses
- 1 Tbsp salt
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- In a large bowl, with a whisk, mix together the flours, starch, xanthan gum, baking powder, and spices until well-combined. Set aside.
- In another large bowl, cream together the powdered and brown sugars, shortening, eggs, molasses and salt.
- To the sugar mixture, add flour mixture, about 2 cups at a time, stirring with a wooden spoon. Once the flour mixture is mostly incorporated, knead the dough in the bowl, slowly punching the dough down in the middle and folding the sides of the dough into the middle. Or, put the dough on a non-stick surface (like a silicone mat or a marble slab), and knead it on there. Incorporate all the flour mixture until you have a stiff dough.
- If the dough is too dry, and will not hold all of the flour, add a Tbsp of water at a time until it will gather into a ball. Resist adding water if at all possible. The dough works best if it is not very moist.
If you refrigerate or freeze the dough, bring to room temp before rolling. For the most uniform cookies, and definitely for the large sections required for gingerbread houses, roll the dough right onto a large piece of foil or parchment, then pick up the sheet and transfer to the cookie sheet. Working with about 1/4 of the dough at a time, roll the dough 1/4″ thick. (Bob Vila’s gingerbread site had a great suggestion: Use 1/4″ round dowels as a guide for uniform thickness, as illustrated on the right.) From this dough, either cut sections for your gingerbread house from a template, or use cookie cutters. - Greasing the pan is not necessary, but I favor using nonstick foil. For best results, use insulated pans. (Hint: for your own insulated pans, take two regular jelly roll pans, and between them, add a layer of heavy duty aluminum foil that has been wrinkled, then partially smoothed out. This will create an air gap between the two pans.)
- If you roll your cookies to 1/4″ thickness and bake on insulated pans as suggested, baking time is 19 minutes. If your cookies are thinner, and/or you’re using thinner pans, bake time will be shorter. When done, the corners of your cookies will just start to brown, and the middles will no longer feel spongy. Also, you can bake for 16-17 minutes to produce a softer, chewier cookie (this is not recommended for gingerbread houses, though).
Oo, fab – thank you. We did a gluten free gingerbread nativity scene a few years ago, and the children are asking if we can do it again this year. I was wondering where the recipe was, so this is very timely!
[...] house is gluten-free, dairy-free (GFCF), nut-free and peanut-free. I used a cookie recipe I devised, royal icing, and candy bought from [...]
I have been wanting to bake GF/CF gingerbread men!!!! THANKS!!! Yeah!!!
Oh wow, this recipe will surely be a hit this holiday season! I don’t think I have seen a GFCF gingerbread recipe anywhere.
[...] is a great GFCF recipe for dough from scratch. Check out her GFCF [...]
I am really excited about this recipe since my daughter is on a gfcf diet and needs to take all of her own things to make gingerbread men in school. Not sure what to do for icing though????
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I just blogged how we used your recipe! The cookies were fun to make and taste delicious. My daughter went cookie cutter crazy, trying out all kinds of shapes! Thanks for sharing!!!
[...] Karen’s Big Batch GFCF Gingerbread Cookies Note: Sweet Rice Flour (or glutenous rice flour) used in these recipes can be obtained at Asian grocery stores for much less than the price you will pay for it at specialty grocery stores. We get ours in a big 5 pound bag for $5.69 per bag at our local Asian market. [...]
Karen, this is a great recipe! I am using this as part of my blog series on the GFCF diet in school, and I think we will make these this Christmas!
Thomas
I am so excited to try this recipe as it gets closer to the holidays, we always have guests on christmas eve and I like to give the kids a fun project to do. Last year I made gfcf cup cakes and let them decorate w/ gfcf frosting & candies. They never know the difference and my little girl doesn’t feel left out. It’ll be great for them to be able to decorate gingerbread men or make little cottages. I also have the feeling they will prob taste pretty “normal” as the ginger flavor is so strong. I recently made a gfcf pumpkin bread in the crock pot and it was excellent. E-M me if you have any questions or ideas to share about holiday recipes for our special little ones. Thanks!
For frosting Pillsbury creamy supreme vanilla frosting is the only manufactured GFCF that I know of
Charissa ~ Glad you’re excited about the recipe!! I think you’ll be pleased with it. Duncan Hines also has several GFCF frostings, but none of them will work as “glue” needed to construct a gingerbread house — you have to use royal icing. But, of course, you could make cookies with the dough and simply frost them.
I don’t suppose you have any advice for making this recipe eggless? That’s kind of a lot of eggs to go without, but I’m going to try it. Thank you for this recipe! My daughter was just asking me if we could build a gingerbread house this year and I told her I don’t know how…now I do! BTW if anyone else here is avoiding eggs I have an eggless royal icing recipe, but DON”T EAT IT, it is only for building and tastes disgusting.
1 cup powdered sugar
1 Tbsp shortening
3 Tbsp cream of tartar
1 1/2 Tbsp xanthan gum
water (add slowly!)
Mix all in the food processor until desired thickness
is reached.
Thank you again, I’m excited to have found your blog!
You ROCK! Last year my dd and I tried to make a gf version of gingerbread men. Complete flop. They were hideous. This year I was looking for a recipe on celiac.com and found your recipe. I had everything in the house so me and my 2 year old got to work on the dough. Then my 4 year old and I rolled and cut out assorted cookies. This was so easy to do that my 4 year old was able to roll out and cut out all her own cookies. Best yet – they taste great. I only added a bit of cardamom and some grated ginger. Thank you thank you thank you. These will be a holiday tradition for us now. Next year I may even try doing a gingerbread house. Yours looked incredible. Again, thank you!
kim
Kim ~ Your comment about made me cry! I know how good it feels to find a “safe” recipe that everyone likes. It’s funny — I was going to post a comment about making the cookies, because we made a house & cookies this week, and I don’t know what happened, but it just didn’t seem as good this year! I’m thinking maybe my brown rice flour wasn’t ground as fine or something, because they turned out a tad gritty/grainy, which they didn’t, last year. I noticed when it was at the dough stage, before I even rolled them out. Bummer. My hubby, who is not g.f., says they still taste great, but I was a little disappointed. However, that has not kept me from enjoying tea and cookies at night!!
Anyways, I am so very glad the recipe worked for you and your kids. Your additions sound great! I don’t have any fresh ginger, but I do have cardamom. I’m going to make another batch next week, and I’ll try it!! And…. DO A HOUSE!! They’re so fun. We’re bringing ours down to city hall today for this year’s contest. 
[...] ride, Grant pushing Fiala in the stroller, me pulling a wagon on which rested the very heavy gingerbread castle, and Wesley trailing behind (ostensibly keeping an eye on our constructed cookie [...]
Hi Karen,
I find the Bob’s Red Mill Rice Flour to be super grainy. I use Energe or Authentic Foods rice flour. THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS RECIPE!!! I posted an alternate version of it on my site with many links to your wonderful blog and I put you on the top of “Blogs I Love!” Thanks for the great recipe.
Thank you so much for [posting this. My mother and brother are Gluten-Free/Dairy-Free and my mother almost completely nut-free so this recipe was such a blessing! They turned out fantastic (I'm not gluten-free, although there's considerable less gluten in my house than others because of the family members who are) and I was totally stunned how tasty they were -- addicting!
I didn't use the amaranth (?) flour since we haven't tried that before [used some of Red Mill's baking flour] and I wasn’t sure what constituted ’sweet’ rice flour so I just used white but it turned out quite well. Crispier than expected even with just seventeen minutes in the oven but very, very good. Oh! And we didn’t have allspice so I put in some nutmeg and omitted the cloves since I’m allergic and I wanted a taste. Again, turned out perfect. <3
[...] go to bed. I did that for 20 minutes, happily reading several incoming links where folks used my GFCF gingerbread recipe to make houses of their own… Then it dawned on [...]
[...] found one thanks to the Christmas cookie roundup I saw on Ginger Lemon Girl. Only Sometimes Clever posted a big-batch gingerbread cookie recipe that is not only GFCF, but also suitable for [...]
[...] great, eco-friendly building elements like a solar roof and composter. We think this GSC-certified gluten-free cabin deserves some fanfare because its sustainable merits are anything but [...]
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