Basic Gingerbread Cookie Dough (2024)

This easy gingerbread cookie dough is great for making cut out gingerbread cookies. It can be used to make a wide range of gingerbread cookies and is a great make ahead gingerbread cookie dough for your holiday baking!

Hi hi! Just popping in to share the recipe for this easy gingerbread cookie dough! This is the cookie dough that I use as the base of my gingerbread cookie recipe, and is going to be a great back pocket recipe, whether you are making holiday cookies or christmas cookies, or you just need a good gingerbread fix!

This recipe is essentially a gingerbread version of my basic sugar cookie recipe, which is made with my sugar cookie dough recipe. It is filled with brown sugar and molasses, and lots of spices, all mixed into a really easy gingerbread dough that is perfect for so many occasions. It is extra delicious finished off with my simple sugar cookie icing.

Ingredients in Gingerbread Cookie Dough

This easy gingerbread dough has a fairly simple ingredients list - it does have a bunch of spices in it, but you can always mix and match those depending on what you have one hand!

• Unsalted butter. The base of almost every good cookie recipe. I use unsalted butter, but if you only have salted, just omit the salt from the recipe.
• Brown sugar. Either light brown sugar or dark brown sugar will work in this recipe.
• Molasses. This provides a richness of flavour, and also texture. Regular molasses or blackstrap will work here, I have tested it with both. It's worth tracking it down if you can, otherwise treacle is a good substitute for molasses.
• Egg. Just one large egg, to help hold things together. I haven't tried making this without the egg.
• All-purpose flour. Also known as plain flour - you want to use a flour without too much protein in it so that the gluten doesn't develop.
• Baking soda. I added just a little to help give my gingerbread cookies a little puffiness.
• Spices. I use a mixture here - mainly ginger and cinnamon, and then also some cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice. If you don't have one of those, you can replace with more cinnamon or cardamom or spice of your choice.

How to scale Gingerbread Cookie Dough recipe

This sugar cookie dough recipe is super easy to scale - you can use the scaling button on the recipe card. Because you roll it out between pieces of parchment paper, you can just divide up the dough once it has been mixed, and roll each out to size.

I wouldn't do more than a triple of this recipe at once as your mixer may not be able to cope with it, but I have doubled it and it came out just fine, so a triple mix should be good to go.

How to evenly roll out gingerbread cookie dough

I roll out my sugar cookie dough between two pieces of parchment paper. I use pre-cut paper the size of a half sheet pan (16.5" x 12.25" / 42x32cm), and the dough, rolled to the correct thickness, should almost fill the space between the two sheets.

I also userolling pin guides, which are silicone strips that lay down either side of the dough. The rolling pin presses down onto them to help the dough be rolled to an even thickness.

Make sure that you flour the parchment paper before placing the dough down, and add another sprinkle of flour on the top to help prevent sticking.

Can Gingerbread cookie dough be made in advance?

This gingerbread cookie dough is great to make in advance. The rolled out dough can be stored up to 3 days in the fridge before cutting out and baking, or you can store the cut-out cookies in the freezer before baking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What tools and equipment do you use?
You can find a full list of the tools and equipment I use on my products page

How do I stop my gingerbread cookie dough from sticking?

Make sure that the parchment paper is lightly floured before placing the dough down, then lightly flour the top surface of the dough too before topping with a second piece of parchment paper. I haven't tried using a silicone mat for rolling this cookie dough out or baking it on - you are welcome to give it a go but I am a parchment paper girl!

How many cookies does this recipe make?

This recipe makes about 20-30 gingerbread cookies, depending on how big your cutters are. I used a 3" / 75mm cookie cutter to make most of the round ones, along with a slightly smaller round cutter and got about 20 cookies, with one round of re-rolling the dough.

For more holiday cookie recipes, check out:

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Key Ingredients

• Cardamom
• Cinnamon
• Ginger

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