An easy gingerbread recipe for a Nordic Christmas

Most people buy their gingerbread dough from the supermarket, which is a pity as it is quite simple to make it yourself. There are some differences between the countries; one of them is which leavening agent we use. In Denmark most recipes I have found use potash, which is potassium carbonate. (Potash was also used elsewhere in the old days but today it is hard to find in food stores – at least in Sweden.) In Sweden and Finland almost every recipe I found uses bicarbonate of soda (baking soda), while in Norway some recipes use bicarbonate of soda and others use baking powder.

I would assume that the resulting differences between the finished gingerbread would be minute. All of the chemicals mentioned above function the same way, and I think that the only real difference is that they are alkaline to different degrees. Potash is the strongest, baking powder the weakest and bicarbonate of soda somewhere in the middle. In general terms, a more alkaline leavening agent gives a shorter texture to the gingerbread. The recipe below is my grandma’s. It uses bicarbonate of soda, but you can use potash if you want.

The way the dough is fashioned into gingerbreads also differs a bit from country to country. The Danes like to shape theirs into a log, before chilling it and cutting it into thin slices that are then baked. This works well when you add almonds and pistachios to your gingerbread (also a Danish thing). The dough is stiff enough to cut without disturbing the position of the nuts, and it creates a really pretty mosaic effect. The other option, which is more common in Sweden and in other places too, sometimes also in Denmark, is to roll the dough out and use a cookie cutter to create shapes before baking them.

Oh, and a weird thing: we all put ginger in our gingerbreads, but we don’t call them gingerbreads; we call them pepper cakes – and we don’t put any pepper in them. The only ones that come close to this are the Danes, who add some allspice. In Sweden we stopped putting pepper in our pepparkakor in the early part of the nineteenth century, although the reason for this is a bit of a mystery.

Preparation and cooking time: 1 1⁄2 hours | Resting time: 2 days
Makes: enough for a traditional, Nordic family gingerbread free-for-all – including a small gingerbread house / enough gingerbread to decorate a fairly large house and feed a small family.

This recipe is an extract from The Nordic Baking Book by Magnus Nilsson (Phaidon)

Next, try more Christmas recipes from the House & Garden archive.