Sourdough Gingerbread Cookies
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Sourdough gingerbread cookies are super easy to make and can be enjoyed anytime of the year, but they are extra special at Christmas time! The cookie dough can be long fermented to increase their flavor profile, and like most sourdough discard recipes, you can use sourdough discard, or fed starter if you prefer.
I hope this recipe helps create some special memories with your family. I know that I have so much fun making these with my boys, they are absolutely one of my favorite things about Christmas!
Why You'll Love This Recipe!
Flavor - These sourdough cookies are extra special thanks to their long fermentation, which allows your starter to deepen the flavor and create beautifully spiced, richly aromatic gingerbread. The sourdough adds a subtle tang that enhances everything we already love about classic gingerbread.
Versatile - you can make individual cookies with cookie cutters, gingerbread men or even a gingerbread house.
Perfect for gifting - these warming sourdough gingerbread cookies make the perfect edible Christmas gift.
If you love making sourdough cookies, you might also enjoy making these sourdough gingerbread crinkle cookies, sourdough biscoff cookies, sourdough chocolate chip cookies or these sourdough snickerdoodles. These sourdough sugar cookies are really fun to decorate with royal icing.
Ingredients
- Sourdough Starter - This recipe uses 120g of sourdough starter. You can use fed, active starter or sourdough starter discard, it's completely up to you.
- Purpose Flour
- Butter - as always I've used salted butter, but if you prefer unsalted butter, feel free to use that instead.
- Dark Brown Sugar - you definitely want dark brown sugar for the best results here, don't substitute with light brown sugar.
- Molasses - it's up to you whether you use regular baking molasses or blackstrap molasses.
- Egg - make sure your egg is room temperature.
- Vanilla Extract - you can use extract or vanilla paste.
- Salt
- Baking Soda
- Ground Spices - I've used cinnamon, ground ginger, cloves, allspice, cardamom and nutmeg. You can adjust the amount of ginger you use depending on how spicy you like these cookies. If you prefer a less pronounced ginger flavor, reduce the ginger amount listed in the recipe.
- Powdered Sugar - you'll only need this if you are going to make the royal icing.
How To Make Sourdough Gingerbread Cookies
A stand mixer makes this dough wonderfully easy to bring together, but you can absolutely mix and knead it by hand if that’s what you have, or even use a hand mixer. Start by whisking the wet ingredients until they’re thick, glossy, and well-emulsified, then work in the dry ingredients until a soft, pliable dough forms. I like to use the whisk attachment at medium speed for the wet ingredients and then add the dough hook for the dry ingredients, running at low speed.
The dough is surprisingly sturdy. My kids have rolled it out, cut shapes, and re-rolled it like play dough without it turning sticky—so it’s perfect for baking with little helpers. Once shaped into two discs and wrapped (you can use parchment paper or plastic wrap), the dough can chill overnight in the fridge so it’s perfectly firm and ready for rolling when you are. If you like to be organised, the dough can chill in the fridge for a couple of days with no issue.
When it’s time to bake, simply roll the dough out, cut your favourite festive shapes, and bake until lightly set (around 10-15 minutes).
After cooling the cookies on a wire rack, you can whip up a quick royal icing by beating egg whites to stiff peaks, then folding in vanilla and powdered sugar until the icing becomes thick, glossy, and pourable. Transfer it to a piping bag and let your creativity take over—these sourdough gingerbread cookies are as fun to decorate as they are delicious to eat.
You'll find a full breakdown of ingredients and instructions in the recipe card at the end of this post.
Kate's Recipe Tips
You can adjust the bake time to change the texture of these sourdough gingerbread cookies. For softer cookies, remove them from the oven after 12 minutes, for a crunchier gingerbread cookie, bake them for around 15 minutes. If you're using this recipe to create a gingerbread house, I recommend baking them until they are just starting to brown on the edges.
Ideas for Decorating
Sourdough gingerbread cookies can be left plain or decorated. There are so many ways you can decorate these! I honestly just love them plain ... but here's a few ideas for creating the prettiest sourdough cookies around!
- Drizzle the cookies with dark chocolate and sprinkle with candied orange rind.
- Make some white royal icing and decorate the gingerbread cookies like I have in the photos (recipe for royal icing is in the recipe card).
- Make your very own sourdough gingerbread men and decorate with chocolate buttons and icing. I use cookie cutters to create the gingerbread men shapes.
- Let your kids cut out their favorite shapes and decorate them with colored royal icing. You can use the royal icing in the recipe card, just add some food coloring to create the colors you want.
- Spread with buttercream icing and add sprinkles or m&ms.
Another fun idea to create with this recipe is a sourdough gingerbread decorating kit! I've used a piping bag of royal icing, Christmas sprinkles and Christmas M&Ms (but of course you can make it as elaborate as you like).
How To Store Sourdough Cookies
Once baked, the cookies will last for up to two weeks if stored correctly in an airtight container. These cookies should be stored in a glass jar or biscuit tin to keep their texture as fresh as possible. Avoid putting them in plastic! It will make them soft.
If you are wanting to keep them fresh, store them undecorated and decorate them right before serving or gifting. Buttercream icing will soften the cookies underneath so if you want them to stay fresh, an icing mixture with just powdered sugar and water is best.
I wouldn't freeze the actual cookies once they're baked, but the dough can be made and stored in the fridge for up to 3 days before baking, or in the freezer for up to 3 months.
Sourdough Gingerbread Cookies
Equipment
- Stand Mixer (with whisk and dough hook attachments)
- Rolling Pin
- Cookie Cutters
Ingredients
- 120 g Sourdough Starter (or sourdough discard)
- 400 g All Purpose Flour
- 120 g Butter
- 250 g Dark Brown Sugar
- 45 g Molasses
- 1 Egg
- 5 g Vanilla Extract (or vanilla paste)
- 5 g Salt
- 10 g Baking Soda
- 3 g Cinnamon
- 9 g Ginger (you can decrease this to 6g if you prefer less spice)
- 0.5 teaspoon Cloves
- 0.5 teaspoon Allspice
- 0.25 tsp Cardamom
- 0.5 teaspoon Nutmeg
Royal Icing
- 3 Egg Whites
- 430 g Powdered Sugar (you can add a little extra if your royal icing is too thick).
- 5 g Vanilla Extract (or vanilla paste)
Instructions
- This recipe can be made using a stand mixer or mixed by hand. I find using a stand mixer the easiest way, but either way works.Mix together butter, sugar, egg, molasses, sourdough discard and vanilla until thick and creamy. The mixture will be quite glossy. I use the whisk attachment for this part.
- Next, add the flour, salt, baking soda and spices and mix together to form a dough (I use the dough hook attachment, running the mixer at low speed for this part).This step can be difficult by hand but persevere with the sticky dough, it will come good. You should be able to roll it into a small ball without it sticking to your hands.
- Once the dough is ready, turn it out on to the counter. Cut it in half. Form each half into a disc and wrap each disc in parchment paper. Place both on top of each other and wrap together with plastic wrap.Place into the fridge for at least 4 hours or overnight.
- When you are ready to make the gingerbread cookies, take the dough out of the fridge and allow it to sit for a few minutes at room temperature.
- Preheat the oven to 165ºC/330ºF.
- Using a rolling pin, roll the dough out to around ¼" thick.
- Cut out shapes using a cookie cutter of your choice.
- Place the gingerbread shapes onto a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
- Bake at 165ºC/330ºF for 10-15 minutes. The gingerbread will still be soft. Allow it to cool for 30 minutes and it will become crunchy. YUM!
Royal Icing
- Add the egg whites to a clean, dry stand mixer bowl. Use the whisk attachment to whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks. This can take some time, around 5 minutes if perfectly normal.
- Once you've got stiff peaks, add the vanilla paste and powdered sugar and continue to whisk until all the sugar is dissolved and you have a liquid consistency.
- Scoop the royal icing into a piping bag and use to pipe designs onto your gingerbread cookies. Allow the icing to set hard before you package the cookies.
Notes
Nutrition
Hi, Kate. If I use active starter, could I not add the baking soda?
Also, are they very sweet? Cause I see there's a lot of sugar.
Great sourdough gingerbread cookie recipe! I used a bit less butter and dark sugar than called for, but that didn't cause any problem. Also added in a bit of black pepper and skipped the cardamom.
Personally, I would up all the spices because I like a very spiced cookie, but if you prefer a subtler cookie, keep the measurements as is.
Thank you for sharing!
Didnt try yet, but wondering: is there a reason i need to add baking powder if i'm using bubbly sourdough starter?
Great recipe. I used emmer flour left in the fridge overnight and they taste amazing. Thanks for the recipe, it’s a keeper for sourdough discard.
Just quadrupled your recipe
Substituted half the butter for crisco. I used white sugar and tripled the molasses. The dough was a little dry and I was having trouble getting the last of the flour mixed in so I added 50g water lol
Then it was too wet. So I slowly added flour it ended up being 100g.
The flavor was amazing and I had forgotten the salt. Lol
Thank you for sharing your recipe
I can’t wait to bake tomorrow.
My kids are going to enjoy cutting and baking Christmas cookies.
Wondering what your thoughts are on subbing coconut sugar for the dark brown sugar. Want to share these with my 1.5 yo
Can I freeze the dough until I need to use it? I’m considering pre-making all my holiday cookie dough to save time down the road. Thanks!
Can anything be substituted for molasses?? My family does not like the taste of it.
You could use honey or golden syrup to replace the molasses.
I've used golden syrup or beet syrup in the past. They don't change the consistency, or flavour of the dough
Do you cool then on the baking tray or on a rack?
Is there something you can substitute for the butter? - I will have someone at Christmas who is unable to have any dairy products at all.
You can try coconut oil.
Instead of butter , can I use avocado oil?
Thank you!!!
You can see how that would work, but the taste and texture of the cookies may not work. I'm a little worried they may come out as one giant flatten cookie. Another solid fat alternative (like coconut oil, vegan butter or palm oil) would likely work much better.
I made these 3 times and they are delicious. I love this recipe!
These were delicious!! Only change I made was using vegan egg substitute (Bobs Red Mill) and vegan butter (Trader Joes) and they came out delicious!! We will be making these again for Christmas next year!!
I make gingerbread cookies every Christmas. They're my favorite. I don't like crunchy gingerbread. I, along with the rest of my extended family, love them soft.
Besides making them and storing them in a plastic bag to soften them, can I make changes to some of the ingredients to make them soft? If I don't cook them as long, how soft will they be?
Thanks for you help.
If you prefer a soft gingerbread cookie, I highly recommend these Sourdough Pfeffernusse Cookies instead. You can leave them un iced if you prefer. They will give you a soft gingerbread cookie.