Gingerbread Recipes for Cookies, Desserts, and a Cocktail

Gingerbread Roll with Cinnamon Cream — Photo: © Tina Rupp

There's sweet, mildly spicy magic in combining ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and molasses in winter gingerbread recipes, whether you're making holiday cookies, loaves of bread, seasonal plated desserts, or a festive drink. Indulge your love for gingerbread flavors with any of these variations, from cookies to decorate to a decorative trifle, plus the perfect bread for a holiday brunch and a merry Margarita.

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Gingerbread Cookies

1996 Food & Wine Best New Chef Maria Helm Sinskey makes her spicy dough with butter instead of shortening and corn syrup so that it tastes fresher than most gingerbreads.

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Gingerbread Cookies with Royal Icing

Chef Michael Mina says his recipe is ideal for decorating the gingerbread cookies with kids.

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Chocolate-Gingerbread Cookies

These marvelous Christmas cookies from Baked's Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito combine chocolate with spicy gingerbread. The supple dough is very easy to work with, and the scraps can be rerolled and cut out.

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Gingerbread Roll with Cinnamon Cream

A riff on a bûche de Noël, this inventive recipe from longtime pastry chef Jennifer Giblin combines tender ginger cake with a tangy cream-cheese filling.

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Pain d'Épices

This hearty, deeply spiced gingerbread loaf from French cook and writer Mimi Thorisson has a wonderful honey-buckwheat flavor.

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Spiced Gingerbread Cookies

Pastry chef and author Julianne Jones’s wonderfully zingy gingerbread cookies have a tender and cakey texture, yet they’re sturdy enough to decorate.

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Gingerbread and White Chocolate Mousse Trifle

Writer and pastry chef Monica Glass's trifle is three desserts in one: mousse, gingerbread, and caramel. Each part is delicious on its own, too.

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Cranberry Gingerbread

With plenty of tart and tangy fresh cranberries, former senior F&W food editor Kay Chun's loaf is perfect sliced, spread with sweet butter and served alongside a cup of hot tea.

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Gingerbread with Quark Cheesecake

Pastry chef Nancy Olsen's clever recipe combines two cakes in one. The cheesecake half is light and creamy, with a pleasant tang from quark (a soft, unripened cheese that's similar to sour cream), while the gingerbread half is fragrant, moist, and delicately spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger.

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Gingerbread with Pears

Former Food & Wine test kitchen editor Diana Sturgis folds dices of a Bartlett pear into the batter before baking a loaf of gingerbread.

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Molasses-Gingerbread Cake with Mascarpone Cream

This gorgeously moist cake from baking instructor Katie Rosenhouse is flavored with molasses for a mellow sweetness. It's excellent served with wine-poached pears or a topping of whipped mascarpone and sugary, slightly bitter confited orange peel.

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