Gingerbread

Makes many many gingerbread stars, trees, men and whatever else you can cut out.

Ingredients
350g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
3 tsp ground ginger
100g butter (softened)
175g muscovado sugar
4 tbsp black treacle
1 egg
(Note: kids might not like the flavour that the musovado and treacle give this gingerbread, so you can substitute it for light soft brown sugar and golden syrup.)

Method
Sieve the flour, ginger and bicarbonate of soda into a bowl. Rub in the butter.
Mix the sugar, treacle and egg together to get all the lumps out of the sugar, and add this to the flour and butter. Mix to a pastry dough. Knead gently. Roll out onto a floured surface to about 5mm think (you might need to split the dough into 2 sections for this unless you have a particularly large work surface) and cut shapes out using pastry cutters or a knife. Gather up all the leftovers and knead gently again, roll out and cut more shapes out. Swap the dough for the other half at this point and do the same. Use all the dough up!
Place onto lined baking sheets and bake for about 10 mins at 180C (my oven's fan assisted, adjust times to suit your oven). Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

For the icing
225g icing sugar and 2-3 tbsps water should make a suitably thick glace icing. Use a piping bag and tiny nozzle. If adding food colouring make the white icing just not thick enough 'cause the colouring (if it's liquid) will make it runnier.