Did you know that this year it is particularly trendy to decorate gingerbread with letters, words and even short messages? Sini Visa, known from the Kinuskikissa blog, advises how to create the sweetest Christmas gingerbread cookies.
Baking gingerbread is included Blue Visa to the annual Christmas traditions. Visa makes the gingerbread dough himself, naturally, after all, he has been running the baking website Kinuskikissa for no less than 16 years.
– I have refined my gingerbread dough recipe for a long time until it became suitable for my taste. I think that peppers should taste like cardamom, says Visa.
However, in the Visa family, peppers are not eaten as they are, because in the kitchen of a baker who focuses on visuals, they must first be decorated.
With text decoration, you can make, for example, peppercorns suitable for Independence Day. You can also choose the color of the sugar paste yourself. By mixing sugar masses, you can also create beautiful marbling patterns. Antti Nikkanen
– Decorating the peppers is a nice activity because you only have time to think about one pepper at a time, which is very relaxing. I usually organize pepper talks, where we get together and decorate peppers as a group. It’s a nice way to spend time together.
This year, the trendiest decorated gingerbread contains text.
– For the last year, text decoration has been a rising trend in cakes, specifically with the printing technique, and it’s nice to bring it to pies as well. With this technology, you can easily identify peppers if you want to give them as a gift, says Visa.
Various personalized wishes or, for example, the name of the recipient can be printed on the peppers.
The text comes out with the help of powdered sugar. Antti Nikkanen
Visa says the technology is also a safe and easy way to create a beautiful impression.
– The technique is also suitable for those who do not have a very stable extruding hand or for whom extruding seems difficult.
Various fonts are available for text formats, so those who like a romantic style can choose, for example, calligraphy.
A traditional piker
If you wish, you can color the pikeer with pasta colors. Antti Nikkanen
The most traditional way to decorate peppers is with icing, which in English is known as royal icing.
Pikeeri is made of egg white and powdered sugar without foaming, and its secret is in its hardness.
Pikeeri is easy to extrude, but for extruding Visa especially recommends tulle with a hole of 1.5 millimeters. Because the extrusion mark is beautiful with Takuu.
– The most important thing is that the ratio of egg whites and powdered sugar is right, so that the piker becomes suitably firm and does not run too much. Foaming makes the piquere more manageable than just stirring.
Extruding is like drawing. Antti Nikkanen
The advantage of Pikeer is that it hardens quickly.
– If you want to combine different colors with the same pepper, you can add another color after half an hour, says Visa.
Thanks to the hard surface, the peppers can be packed on top of each other – without them getting tangled.
– Peppers can also be decorated well in advance, which makes Christmas preparations easier.
With 1.5 millimeter tulle, the extrusion mark will be neat. Antti Nikkanen
In addition to her blog, Visa also shares peppermint and other Christmas baking tips in her new book Sweet Year of the Kinuska Cat, which came out this fall. The book contains recipes for different seasons. – From a home baker’s point of view, holidays and seasons give rhythm to the year, so I wanted to make a book based specifically on the cycle of the year.
Seven years had already passed since the previous book, so the ideas for the new book were allowed to brew in peace. Visa says that the new book is a kind of basic baking work, which contains Visa’s own credit recipes as well as classics that everyone loves, such as instructions for mocha pieces and ear sticks.
Visa considers baking to be a basic skill that everyone should master, at least partially.
– Even a beginner can succeed with these recipes.
For example, you can invite friends to the pepper decoration talks, Sini Visa advises. Antti Nikkanen
Pikeper
0.5 dl of protein
3.5 dl powdered sugar
1. Measure the egg white and powdered sugar into a bowl. Beat with an electric mixer for 3–4 minutes. Color if desired by mixing in pasta color.
2. The thickness of the cake is regulated by the amount of powdered sugar. Adjust the amount depending on the purpose of use. For loose decorations, you need a thick, sturdy mixture – add 0.25–0.5 deciliters of powdered sugar to the basic portion. The extrusion covering a larger surface can be a little more runny (reduce 0.25–0.5 deciliters from the basic dose if necessary).
3. Pikeeri dries and hardens quickly. If you don’t start extruding right away, put the piker in a piping bag and tape the end of the tulle and store the piker in the refrigerator. If everything doesn’t fit in the piping bag at once, wet a paper towel with water and use it to cover the piqué remaining in the bowl.
Recipe: Kinuskiki
This is how you can succeed in decorating with pikers
1. Use 1.5 millimeter tulle.
2. The tulle is allowed to hit the pepper when pressing, so that you get support and a neater handprint.
3. Imagine drawing while extruding.
4. Exaggerate the shapes, because when baking, the shapes always round out a bit.
5. Use attractive pepper molds and extrude the piker according to the edges. This way you get particularly decorative peppers and the shapes of the edges are emphasized.