Gingerbread Season

 

Yesterday was a good day for staying in and baking some Christmas gingerbread biscuits! (I'd prepared the dough in my food processor the day before.)

Do you bake these for Christmas? My recipe is one I came up with back in my youth, I think it was a mix between my mum's recipe and one from my first cookery book. Mum used to have ginger, cinnamon and clove in hers. In mine, I also have cardamom. (I love cardamom...)

There have been years in my life when I've not felt up to this kind of baking because of problems with neck-shoulder-arm. I'm happy I've been able to pick up the tradition again in more recent years. I've adjusted my recipe to only a third of the original, though. (In the past, I also used to have more friends over to share the calories...)

Baking Ginger Snaps

 

No Christmas without ginger snaps!
Today, and 60 years ago...

 

Baking a small batch of ginger snaps today made me think of these old photos in one of my  early photo albums. The year was 1960. I'm 5 years old here. Back in the spring or summer the same year, we (my parents and I) had moved from a flat in town to a house of our own in a village nearby. The kitchen was a galley kitchen with a dining alcove. Whether mum also made her own Christmas ginger snaps while we were still living in the flat, I can't remember. But I'm pretty sure she did it every year from then on. I have baked my own most years of my adult life as well. Not quite every year, though - for one thing, there have been years when I couldn't manage it because of neck/arm problems. But I've always missed it when I've not been able to do it. 

 

Christmas Update

*Someone* ate all my gingerbread biscuits…

… so I had to bake some more today…