This post is part of the 2019 Homeschooling Through the Holidays series and was written by Allison from Faith, Family, and Frosting.
Gingerbread: Our favorite Christmas tradition!
What smell is better to fill your home around the holidays than gingerbread? This warm, cozy, spicy smell puts me in the holiday spirit immediately! We incorporate gingerbread into our holiday traditions every year. I want to share these traditions with you, along with some tips to make it fun and engaging for your kids. We tend to have buttermilk pancakes once a week for dinner each Sunday night. We have a House Church lunch every Sunday. This feast helps us celebrate the Lord’s Supper as a full meal and focus on the joy of Jesus’ return one day. It is a fabulous start to the week. But after preparing and eating all that food, who wants a big dinner too? So we tend to have breakfast for dinner each Sunday evening. The recipe that follows is a twist on our normal buttermilk pancake recipe. Starting in December each year we switch to Gingerbread Pancakes! (These are actually the only ones Little Love will eat! She tends to skip the “plain” pancakes). And we make sure to have these for Christmas morning breakfast as well. My dad always cooked up a WONDERFUL breakfast Christmas morning. As a kid it felt like torture to sit through breakfast when a huge pile of presents was just waiting for us in the next room. Now its my turn to torture the kids! (muah-ha-ha!) To make this easier on Christmas morning, however, I cook up a double batch the week before and freeze them. That way you can pop them in the oven while you cook up the eggs, sausage, bacon…whatever else you enjoy for breakfast!Recipe
Dry Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp round cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
Wet Ingredients:
2 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup melted butter
3 tbsp molasses
1 tsp vanilla extract
Butter or oil for cooking (I prefer coconut oil)
- Melt 1/2 cup butter in microwave or stovetop and let cool slightly.
- Mix together dry ingredients, whisk to combine.
- Stir in eggs, melted butter, molasses and vanilla.
- Begin heating your butter or oil on the stove top.
- Add buttermilk just before you are ready to cook. (I’ve heard this helps the pancakes remain fluffy.) Mix until just combined. The batter will be lumpy.
- Cook pancakes on medium heat until bubbles fill the top. Flip and cook an additional 2-3 minutes.
Gingerbread Houses!
Another gingerbread tradition in our house are Gingerbread Houses! Over the years we have used both graham crackers and homemade gingerbread to construct our houses. I prefer homemade, but sometimes the graham crackers are a nice time saver! Here is a link to my go-to gingerbread cookie recipe. Also, the best advise I can give is to forget the store bought icing, and make your own royal icing! This is the best for holding your structure together as it hardens like a rock! To bring this all together for our Homeschooling Through the Holidays theme, I thought I’d share some simple ideas to extend the Gingerbread House tradition into reinforcing some educational concepts!- Create patterns with different kinds of candy. Popular spots on our houses on along the roof line, on a path leading up to the door, or around the edges of the “yard.”
- Challenge each other to create unique structures: add a chimney, Santa’s sleigh, a pool!
- Do some research about how Christmas is celebrated around the world. You could choose a country to theme your gingerbread house after!
- Have a contest. You can have prizes for tallest, most colorful, most creative or unique!
The Season of Baking!
Christmas is the season of baking! If you have ever desired to learn to decorate sugar cookies like a pro, check out my tips for beginners in this post: 3 important steps to begin cookie decorating. And If you enjoy a simple classic here is a great post about finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe!Alison Bradford is a blogger who resides in South Carolina. After seven years teaching in the public school system, she decided to stay home to raise and educate her two young girls. She is a habitual cookie baker and enjoys blogging about their adventures at Faith, Family, and Frosting. You can follow their adventures on Facebook.
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