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gingerbread spice in jar with gingerbread man cookie cutter

Homemade Gingerbread Spice

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  • Author: Elizabeth Farr
  • Total Time: 5 minutes
  • Yield: 3 Tablespoons 1x

Description

Gingerbread spice is a mild blend of sweet spices.  Made from whole spices and freshly ground, this will have more flavor than any packaged gingerbread you eat. EVER.  Use it in all your Christmas baking or any place you would use cinnamon when you’re needing a little Christmas spirit in your bakes.

Ingredients

Scale
  • 1 Tablespoon ground cinnamon (see note)
  • 1 and 1/2 teaspoons whole cloves

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  • 1 teaspoon allspice berries
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1 teaspoon anise seed
  • 1/2 of a whole nutmeg 
  • 1/2 teaspoon blade mace (optional, or you can add more nutmeg)
  • 2 whole star anise
  • 8 whole green cardamom pods

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Instructions

How to blend the spices

  1. Crack open the cardamom pods

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    .  I find this is the easiest to do in a mortar and pestle, but you can also wrap up the cardamom in a towel and lightly crush them.  Pull out the black seeds, and then discard the green hulls.  
  2. You’ll also need to crack open the nutmeg as it won’t grind well while whole.  Wrap it in a towel and give it a good whack with a meat pounder or something equally heavy.  It won’t require much force to break it.
  3. Place all of the spices in a small coffee grinder

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     and grind into a powder with the texture of ground cinnamon.  Store gingerbread spice in a glass jar for easy use in recipes.

gingerbread spice blend in coffee grinder

Equipment

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Notes

About cinnamon: I also grind my own cinnamon.  For this blend, I prefer to grind 1 stick each of Saigon cinnamon

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and Ceylon cinnamon

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.  The ceylon has a brighter, less spicy flavor that’s favored in European gingerbread blends, but I like the bite of the Saigon too.  I will grind these first and use the amount indicated in the recipe (save the rest for recipes with cinnamon or your coffee!).

Make it your own: The amounts listed are my personal preferences, but they may not be yours.  We had a local coffee house that made a chai that would burn your throat with the amount of ginger it had in it–it was good and also painful, but I appreciated that they made what they liked.  Be like that coffee house and adjust individual spices until they taste good to you.

Find it online: https://bakingwithtradition.com/homemade-gingerbread-spice/