Gingerbread Season by Theresa Gauthier

Gingerbread: Timeless Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Desserts, Ice Cream and Candy by Jennifer Lindner McGlinn

I’m obsessed with gingerbread. I love it in all its forms. Cookies, cakes, lattes—whatever it is, adding the word gingerbread to the description makes it seasonal and delicious.  You’ve seen it yourself, I’m sure. There’s no shortage of commercially available treats that seem to add a gingerbread option to their line of products; Gingerbread Oreos, Gingerbread Kit Kats, Gingerbread Pop Tarts, and even gingerbread tea and gingerbread butter.

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was a cookbook called Gingerbread: Timeless Recipes for Cakes, Cookies, Desserts, Ice Cream and Candy by Jennifer Lindner McGlinn. There are a lot of great ideas in here, and I’ve tried more than a few. There are step by step plans for making a gingerbread house, there’s a great cake recipe—that I actually turned into cupcakes with a yummy gingerbread buttercream frosting. There’s a Pumpkin-Gingerbread Loaf Cake, a Gingerbread Pound Cake and there’s a delectable gingerbread bread pudding that checks all the boxes, sweet, spicy, custardy, and scrumptious.

One of the best perks of the book is the inclusion of recipes within the recipes. The Apple Butter-Gingerbread Cake includes a recipe for apple butter and the final chapter is called Basics and Accompaniments and includes everything from royal icing and whipped cream to candied orange peel.

What I really love about this book is that it gives you so many options. There isn’t just one cookie. There’s an entire chapter on cookies. Chewy cookies or gingersnaps or shortbread or gingerbread people—there’s so many things to try I sometimes find it difficult to decide just where to start. 

The book isn’t focused on cookies. There are other options like gingerbread waffles, pancakes, blondies, brownies, and glazes.

The part of the book that I found the most surprising was the chapter on ice creams and confections. I’d never considered making gingerbread toffee, spiced caramels, and Gingerbread-Hazelnut Rum Balls—there’s a lot to make you head for your kitchen. 

The book includes many beautiful photos to inspire and to show you just how the finished products should look. 

There is a special chapter on gingerbread houses, and the photographs include detailed templates to help you cut the gingerbread to exactly the sizes required for the gingerbread church and the—wait for it!—the Gingerbread Betsy Ross House! It’s truly adorable, and I wish I’d thought of it! 

The directions break it all down for you so you know how much gingerbread dough you need, how much royal icing, even how much food coloring you need to duplicate the look of this historic piece of gingerbread.

There’s a lot to love here, and I tend to get lost in the pages whenever I dive into it. With so many options, I keep wishing a week had an extra day in between Saturday and Sunday just so I could have an extra day to bake my gingerbread.