Piparkökur

Gingerbread

When you can combine two hobbies perfectly - I always love that!

My love for Icelandic sweaters and my love for Icelandic gingerbread have resulted in something very special: gingerbread in a lopapeysa look!

Child 3 arrived on Monday evening, he currently has an exchange student from Washington here and they all wanted to bake Christmas cookies together in the school kitchen on Tuesday. Oh yes, mom, the teacher just wrote that we have to bring some more dough... Yay. Luckily I was planning on baking gingerbread over the next few days anyway and had all the necessary ingredients in the house, so I was able to make the dough straight away overnight. The next day the children took half the dough to school and I baked the other half myself.

Ingredients

300 g sugar

300 g sugar beet syrup

300 g butter

200 ml sour cream

1/2 tsp cardamom

1 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground pepper

3 tsp cinnamon

800 g flour

2 tsp baking soda

Preparation

Place a large pot on the stove and add the sugar, sugar beet syrup and butter and slowly melt over low heat.

Mix everything well.

Then remove the pot from the heat and add the sour cream, spices, flour and baking powder and mix everything into a smooth dough.

Then chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least 8 hours, preferably overnight.

Then preheat the oven to 200" upper/lower heat.

Divide the cold dough into several portions and roll out the individual portions (while still nice and cool!) thinly on a work surface lined with baking paper and cut out the gingerbread cookies using cookie cutters to taste.

Place the gingerbreads on a baking tray lined with baking paper and bake at 200" for about 10 minutes.

Attention baking time:

For small cookies like the sheep here, 8 minutes are enough, while large shapes like the horse or the sweater take more than 12 minutes . So be sure to keep an eye on the cookies when baking and, if in doubt, start with 8 minutes and then extend the baking time.

Let the gingerbread cookies cool on the tray and then carefully remove them from the baking paper.

Then decorate the gingerbread cookies as desired.

For the decoration, I melted white chocolate, dark chocolate and whole milk chocolate in a water bath, and (for the Icelandic horses and sheep here) I mixed powdered sugar with a little water - and then I went wild decorating the gingerbreads to my heart's content!

Here are a few Icelandic horses and sheep...

...and here of course the Icelandic sweaters with a classic round yoke.

And a few more classic Pfefferuchen men, with chocolate icing, powdered sugar and colorful sugar pearls.

It turned out to be a nice mix...!

Enjoy it! Verði ykkur að góðu!

Or as my colleague said...? "You're best at sweaters, no matter the material!"

[Translated from here.]

Kanilterta

Cinnamon cake

My youngest child had a birthday last week.

Of course I baked him a birthday cake and since he liked the cinnamon cake ("kanilkaka") so much in the summer, he got a cinnamon cake for his birthday this year:

Two layers of cinnamon cake and delicious buttercream.

Ingredients

Ingredients for 2 bases

300 g melted butter

320 g flour

240 g white sugar

200 g brown sugar

4 large eggs

2 tsp ground vanilla

1 pinch of salt

4 tsp cinnamon

Ingredients for the buttercream

250 g butter

500 g powdered sugar

4 Tbsp baking cocoa

2 Tbsp cream

1 pinch of ground vanilla

1 Tbsp cappuccino powder

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 350 °F (180 °C) upper/lower heat.

Let the butter slowly melt.

Place the flour, sugar, eggs, ground vanilla, salt and cinnamon in a large bowl,...

...add the melted butter...

... and mix everything thoroughly.

Line two springform pans with baking paper and pour the dough evenly into both pans.

Bake the cake in a preheated oven at 350 °F (180 °C) for 20 minutes (test with a toothpick!).

Then let the two bases cool and then carefully remove them from the mold.

For the cream, put all the ingredients in a bowl...

... and mix thoroughly into a uniform cream.

Place the first cake layer on a cake plate or similar and spread about a third of the cream on the bottom layer.

Place the second layer on top...

... and spread with the second third of the buttercream.

Finally, decorate the top of the cake as desired and pipe the last third of the cream all around.

Because this cake was a birthday cake, candles were of course placed on top before it was served. Happy Birthday!

Bon appetit!

[Translated from here.]