Gingerbread biscuits Advent calendar

Melt your butter, sugar, and golden syrup in a pan over a low heat until it all dissolves. Then remove from the heat and leave it to cool. While you wait, combine your flour, spices, baking powder and salt in a bowl until well mixed.

Beat an egg white into your cooled syrup mixture and combine this with your flour and spice bowl. Stir well and roll together into a smooth gingerbread ball. Wrap the ball in clingfilm or beeswax wrap and pop in the fridge to chill for 3 hours.

Once chilled, remove your gingerbread mix from the fridge. Line 3 or 4 baking sheets with baking parchment paper and preheat your oven to 190’C. Lightly flour a flat surface and roll out your gingerbread mix until it is flat and smooth – around 5mm thick.

Use your Christmas cookie cutters to stamp out your festive shapes – you will need 24 in total for your advent calendar. Transfer your gingerbread shapes to the lined trays, allowing for space in between. Once on the tray, make a small hole at the top of each biscuit using a skewer (this is where you will hang the string later.) 

Bake the gingerbread biscuits in the oven for approx. 10 mins until slightly golden. Then allow them to cool for 5-10 mins.

Meanwhile, make the icing by beating your egg white in a bowl using a whisk or a fork. Mix in the icing sugar and continue to beat until smooth and stiff enough to start piping. Spoon the icing into a piping bag and fit with a nozzle.

Decorate each biscuit slightly differently around the edge and pipe a number from 1 – 24 on the centre of each one. You can add sprinkles or different coloured icing depending on how you want the biscuits to look. Once they are all decorated, leave to completely dry.

Once your biscuits are dry, get your ribbons ready and loop on to each biscuit using the top hole you created with the skewer. You can use ribbons of different colours and lengths as this will look cute when it comes to hanging them up. How you choose to hang your Advent gingerbread biscuits is up to you.

You could hang them directly onto your Christmas tree, or a separate smaller tree made with wooden branches. Alternatively, you could attach the ribbons onto a tired mobile structure, so they all dangle down at different heights. Or, you could simply hang them in a long line to hang under a shelf or across your kitchen wall.