The Olympic opening ceremony was amazing! Some of my favourites parts were the cycling doves, the transition from green countryside to industrial revolution and of course the Queen and James Bond! It's been hard to resist watching the sport on tv all day - so many exciting sports to watch but I need to do some work too!On the weekend I had fun making these gingerbread sportsmen with my sister (iced while watching the swimming).
We made gingerbread people for sports from swimming to cycling and equestrian to tennis. Unfortunately there were a few accidents after they left the oven (the horse's tail fell off, the cyclist has a broken back wheel and the tennis player now has a bit of a dodgy shoulder!)
This is the recipe we used for the gingerbread sports people:
10oz (300g) self-raising flour
pinch of salt
3 tsp ground ginger
4 oz (100g) caster sugar
2oz (50g) margarine
3 tbsp golden syrup
4 tbsp milk
Heat the oven to 160C / 325F / Gas Mark 3 and grease a baking tray.
Mix the flour, salt and ginger in a bowl. Warm the sugar, margarine and syrup and stir together then add to the dry ingredients and stir well. Add milk and mix to make a firm dough.
Lightly knead the dough then roll out and cut out the people. I used a little man cutter to cut a basic person shape before adapting to make different sports people. You can experiment with the cutters you have - my horse was made from a cat shaped cutter! I pushed one of its ears in to make a bigger head and pushed the tail down to look more horse like. Other things like the tennis racket, bicycle etc were all moulded by hand.
Bake for about 10-15 minutes. Allow to cool slightly before carefully lifting onto a wire rack.
The biscuits were decorated with glace icing (we used yellow, red, blue and green food colouring - as we didn't have any black we mixed a dark purple for one of the rings from red and blue).
