Gingerbread

It’s been a couple of years since I made gingerbread, and at that time I was focusing on making it GAPS friendly. I’m currently eating keto, so had a different focus this time. But by tweaking one or two ingredients, you can adapt this to be gluten free, dairy free, GAPS, Paleo, keto, or pretty much whichever variant of whole food diet you favour. Not AIP though – because without the spice, it wouldn’t be gingerbread!

I made two batches – the first one was cut into Christmas shapes. Then a few days later, I made an easier batch, just cut up.

Ingredients

• 2.5 cups (280gm) almond flour
• ¼ tsp sea salt
• ½ tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 2 tsp ginger powder
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves
• ½ cup sweetener of choice (note 1)
• 1 egg
• ¼ cup / 2 oz / 55g butter, melted (note 2)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (note 3)

Note 1 –  I used lakanto (a Monkfruit/ erythritol blend) to make it keto, but use whatever works for your diet plan. For GAPS, use honey or even mashed date might work. For Paleo, dehydrated cane juice, or maple syrup.

Note 2 – if you need to be dairy free, coconut oil will work too.

Note 3 – I didn’t have any, so used ½ tsp vanilla powder instead.

Process

In a large bowl, combine all the dry ingredients. In a smaller bowl, mix together the wet ingredients. Stir wet ingredients into dry, until it all clumps together. If it doesn’t quite bind together add a tiny bit of water, a drop at a time, till it does. It should look roughly like this.

Batch 1 – Christmas

Shape into a rough log, wrap in baking paper and chill for 1-2 hours.

Roll out, between two pieces of baking paper, to about ¼ inch / ½ cm thick. Then use your cookie cutter to cut out shapes. You will need to be very careful as the dough doesn’t hold together well, being without gluten. Use a spatula to carefully lift your shapes off the baking paper and onto your lined oven tray.

Then gather up the left over bits, reshape into a new ball, and roll out again. I rolled out about 3 times, then got bored. So what was left got made into balls and flattened. These weren’t at all pretty, so no photos of those! But here’s what one of the trays looked like before baking. I used a few sugar free chocolate bits to decorate some, and some cut up dried strawberries on others.

Bake for 10 to 12 mins at 350F / 175C watching carefully to make sure they don’t burn.

Don’t try and move them off the tray till they’re quite cool, by which time they will be a bit more sturdy. Here’s some of the cooked ones.

For a keto dessert, I’d probably serve them with some whipped or clotted cream.

If you’re not as low carb as that, feel free to decorate with whatever you fancy.

Batch 2 – quick & easy version

From my first batch, the bits I like best were the thicker lumps that I threw together from the leftovers that I couldn’t be bothered rolling out again. So I decided to make another batch, and just roll it into a log, then slice it.

This time when I rolled up in baking paper, I was a bit more careful about getting a nicely shaped log, that could be sliced up.

After chilling for a couple of hours, I sliced it up it up, and laid the pieces out on a tray. I decided they were a bit big and cut most of them in half. Apart from that, same process as the other batch.