Estonian Peppercakes

Hello,
Here is the photo of “Ginger AHHAA”, the Estonian recipe of a classic gingerbread, which is actually called in Estonian language "Peppercakes". 

Ingredients
2 dl brown syrup
1,5 dl sugar
250 g butter
2 eggs
10 dl flour
3 tablespoon gingerbread spice
( or mix yourself 1 part grounded ginger, 1 clove, 1  cardamon, 1 cinnamon, and 0,3 part spice,  0,3 black pepper, grated orange peel)
2 teaspoon soda
2 tablespoon cacao. Can be added more. Cacao gives colour and bitterness.

Directions

1. Heat syrup and sugar, while sugar is melted. Add butter and melt it in hot syrup.
2. Let syrup cool down
3. Whip eggs and add flour with spices
4. Mix together syrup and flour. Knead the dough until the bowl is ” clean”, and dough separates from the bowl
5. For Baking.  Fold the dough with the palm-size pieces and knead it while it is elastic.
6. Roll dough to 2-3 mm and form peaces of house
7. Bake in the oven 180 C, ca 8-10 minutes.
8. For glaze, mix 1 egg white with 100 g icing sugar (or more, it depends on egg size), use color if you want.

Set the house together with the glaze. You can hide candies into the building. Add all kinds of extras you like and set it as a decoration to somewhere nice. Preferably eat it in June- by then the bread is soft and glaze is hard. Delicious! (it was something we always eat in my birthday, 9th of June with my friends instead of cake 😊)

With best,
Pilvi Kolk, Science Centre AHHAA, Estonia