Itching to bring a little bit of the holidays to your Dar Chebab but can’t figure out how? Get together with your girls’ club, cooking club, or women at your neddi for a cookie party: baking, building, and decorating. Collect fun candies and sprinkles at your hanut and use the ground coconut for snow.
You can use this as a cultural lesson, an English lesson (parts of a house, colors, baking/building/decorating verbs) or just an excuse to fill your kids with sugar and send them home with way too much energy.
Spicy Gingerbread Cookies
- 6 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for work surface
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
- 4 teaspoons ground ginger
- 4 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
- 1 teaspoon finely ground pepper
- 1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt
- 1 cup (2 sticks or 1/2 pound) unsalted butter (at room temperature)
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 1 1/4 cup date syrup
Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt in a large bowl and set aside. Beat butter and brown sugar together in a large bowl until fluffy. Mix in eggs and date syrup. Add flour mixture, mixing on low until just combined. Divide dough into thirds and wrap each in plastic. Refrigerate until cold and firm, about one hour or up to two days (or months in the freezer).
Preheat oven to 350 degrees (low for gas ovens, like fat raindrops). Roll out dough on a lightly floured work surface to a 1/4-inch thick. Cut into shapes of your choice (if you are making houses, you want to use a stencil so that the dimensions are the same for each side of the house, use cardboard, and cookie cutters to cut windows and doors out of each stencil - more recommendations below). Spread two inches apart on baking sheets lined with parchment paper (it is at Marjane, but you can also just butter and flour the pans well). Bake cookies until crisp but not dark, 12 to 14 minutes. Let cool on clean dry towels.
Royal Icing
- 3 egg whites
- 4 cups sugar ‘glacee'
- (if you have it, ½ teaspoon cream of tartar, but not necessary)
- (also optional) zest of one lemon
Royal icing needs to be kept covered, because it will dry quickly and become lumpy if exposed to the air. The easiest way to store the icing for long periods of time is in a plastic zip-top bag.
In a large bowl, whip the egg whites (with the cream of tartar, if you have it) until foamy. Sprinkle in the sugar gradually, whipping all the while. The more you whip the icing, the stiffer it’ll be and the faster it will harden up. If you want to “paint” with the icing, you can use food coloring to create different colors and thin the icing with a few drops of water so it will flow.
Building tips
1. Use cardboard to make a stencil for each wall of the house. Moroccan houses are easy because you can leave them roof-less and then they are a simple rectangle. If you want to add the Kasbah tops that are on the corners of houses, cut a separate stencil and ‘glue’ them on later with icing.
2. When constructing use cups and boxes to hold up the structure as it dries. The royal icing is very strong once it dries, but it needs to stay still.
3. Construct houses on cardboard scraps (like a flap from a box) and ‘glue’ them down with icing. This makes transportation easier and provides a base to catch the decoration bits.4. Younger children have a hard time with sprinkles, so be sure to get more candies and nuts than sprinkles.
5. Consider your group, it may make more sense for each person to decorate one wall of a house and then to construct the house after all walls are decorated (but some decorations may have to be re-attached after).
6. Have a good clean-up plan, or better yet, decorate on tables over a big tarp!
