Arkhangelsk painted gingerbread roe.

Beverages Kozuli is the name given to baked goods made from rye or wheat flour, which had a ritual purpose in ancient times. Kozuli are a kind of gingerbread, they traditionally baked for the Christmas holidays,

usually a few days after Christmas. Baking roe has always been a sacrament. Each family had different roe recipes; they were carefully preserved and passed down from generation to generation. Traditional ritual roe were baked figurines of goats, cows, sheep, deer and other livestock.

Ducks, chickens and geese were also often depicted in such baked goods. By baking figures of animals and birds from dough, people asked the forces of nature to protect their livestock from disease and pestilence. Roe gingerbread often became amulets for barns and houses; they were given to relatives, as well as to carolers who came to the house. During the Christmas holidays, girls gave roe deer to boys.

It was believed that if you bake roe deer and treat it to a guy, you will definitely get married within a year.

In the old days, dark rye flour was the main ingredient for making roe. But there are also recipes for roe deer with regular wheat flour.

You will need:
5 tbsp. sugar (1 tbsp for glaze and 4 tbsp for dough);
2.5 tbsp. water (1.5 tbsp - for the dough, 1 tbsp - for the glaze);
3 eggs;
5 egg yolks (for dough);
2 egg whites (for glaze);
0.5 tsp. salt;
2 tsp. soda;
2-3 tbsp. l. spices for the dough (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, ground cloves in proportions to your taste);
2 drops of vinegar essence into the glaze;

1.5-1.8 kg of flour.

Arkhangelsk roe deer: traditional recipe 1. Melt 2 cups of granulated sugar over low heat. For this

It is best to use thick-bottomed dishes.

2. Without removing the melted sugar from the heat, carefully pour 1.5 cups of boiling water into it in very small portions. When pouring boiling water into sugar, do not lean too low over the bowl to avoid getting burned by the steam. Stir the sugar mixture constantly with a wooden spoon until smooth.

3. Add 2 more cups of sugar, continuing to slowly stir the mixture with a spoon. 4. Remove the sugar syrup from the heat and add 400 g of margarine to it, stir. The mass should not be homogeneous

5. Beat 5 yolks and 3 eggs.

6. Pour the egg mass into the cooled sugar syrup with margarine, add salt, soda and a mixture of spices for the dough.

7. Knead the dough, carefully and gradually adding wheat flour to the mixture. You should not be embarrassed by the fact that the dough sticks very much to your hands. After steeping, it will become more elastic, similar to plasticine. But you shouldn’t add extra flour at the kneading stage - the roe will be too tough.

8. Roe deer according to this recipe is not a quick task, sinceThe finished dough must be left in a cold place for at least 12 hours. You can stand it for a day.

9. Roll out the dough into a layer 0.5-0.7 cm thick. Using ready-made or homemade cardboard templates, cut out figures from it.

10. Bake roe at a temperature of 180-200°C until done.

11. Prepare the glaze for the roe. To do this, thoroughly beat 2 egg whites. Boil syrup from 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup of water, remove from heat, cool slightly and pour in the whites. Beat the glaze with a mixer for 10-15 minutes, then add 2 drops of vinegar essence.

12. Decorate the finished product with icing sugar, adding food coloring if necessary.

Enjoy your tea!

Variations of roe sculpting according to recipe

Roes are usually made in the form of animals

Birds are a favorite subject of roe deer, which they made in Pomerania

Roe can be made in different ways: traditional roll-out roe

Ritual volumetric roe deer. A mandatory attribute of such roe deer is branched antlers.
(they are associated with the idea of fertility and abundance)

Reader Recipes 17.12.2014

Dear readers, would you like to try, or rather, first learn how to cook real Arkhangelsk New Year’s gingerbread - roe? Today on the blog I offer you such a master class from a true professional in her field, Valasina Asya. She grew up on the shores of the White Sea in the Arkhangelsk region, a native Pomeranian. Her mother baked these Arkhangelsk gingerbreads - roe. Asya has taken over the family baton and now bakes them herself. Now he lives and works in Moscow, but maintains and does not change northern traditions.

I think everyone will be interested in learning this recipe from a professional. Imagine how you can surprise your loved ones and please them with such masterpieces. I met Asya when I accepted articles for our winter magazine “Scents of Happiness,” which we are now designing with a designer. Don't miss it. Subscribe to the magazine and please yourself and your loved ones with our mood. Subscription form here. And now we are meeting with a master class on baking Arkhangelsk gingerbread. I give the floor to Asya.

Arkhangelsk New Year gingerbread - roe

On the shores of the White Sea, New Year and Christmas have long been celebrated with the most beautiful fragrant gingerbread - roe deer. Roes are baked only in winter for Christmas and New Year from gingerbread dough, cut out with molds or using cardboard templates and decorated with sugar icing - white and pink. Traditional forms of roe deer are figures of animals (deer, lion and others), birds, a Christmas star, a shepherd, an angel, a basket with gifts, a Christmas tree, a sleigh and deer, and a house. Now other modern forms of roe deer have appeared. The skill of baking roe deer is inherited from grandmothers and mothers. Family molds for gingerbread are also passed on.

There is one secret in the skill of making these gingerbread cookies - they cannot be made in a hurry or in a bad mood. You won't succeed - the gingerbread will crack during baking or will be hard as a brick. To make the gingerbreads tasty and beautiful, you need to put yourself in a good mood, wish all your loved ones all the best, thank life for everything you have and start with a smile. The dough for roe deer is made when no one will disturb you, since this process requires a calm, peaceful state of the hostess - we always did it usually late in the evening.

Arkhangelsk roe deer. Master Class. Recipe. Photo

How to make Pomeranian, Northern Arkhangelsk roe gingerbread?

First stage. Making gingerbread dough for roe deer.

You need:

approximately 2 kg of flour (sift through a sieve),
two eggs,
200-250 gr. (pack) of butter or butter margarine,
1 tablespoon baking soda (quench with vinegar)
spices (ground cinnamon, cloves, ginger, coriander or a ready-made spice mixture for gingerbread) - to taste,
a glass of drinking water (for example, chilled boiled water),
3-3.5 cups granulated sugar.

How is the dough for roe deer made?

Step 1. Place 2-2.5 cups of granulated sugar in a pan and pour 1 cup of cold boiled water into it. Cook the syrup over low heat.

While the syrup is cooking, cut the butter (or creamy margarine) into small pieces.

At the same time, burn one glass of granulated sugar on another burner. Pour granulated sugar into a small metal pan and place on low heat. The sugar will begin to melt. Stir constantly with the handle of a spoon or knife. We wait until the sugar melts to a brown liquid, and then foam appears. Let it simmer a little and pour the burnt sugar into the finished syrup in a very thin stream with constant stirring.

Add butter cut into small pieces to the resulting mixture. And mix to get a homogeneous liquid. Let the resulting liquid cool in the cold (for example, take the pan out onto the balcony).

Soak the dishes in warm water, otherwise it will be difficult to wash them off from frozen sugar.

Step 2. While the mixture cools, prepare the spices. Place 2 tablespoons of spices in a large saucepan: we usually use cinnamon and ground cloves. We buy whole cloves at the store and grind them ourselves. This makes the gingerbread cookies more flavorful. You can use other spices - ginger, coriander or a mixture of them.

Beat two eggs with a mixer or whisk and add to the same pan. And put in it one tablespoon of baking soda slaked with vinegar.

When the mixture has cooled on the balcony, pour it in too. Mix everything until it becomes a homogeneous liquid.

Step 3. We mark the time on the timer. Let's start kneading the dough. This process should take at least one hour. Even if it seems to you after half an hour that the dough is ready, continue kneading it. Otherwise, when baking, the gingerbread cookies will crack and “give away” your haste with these cracks.

Add flour in small portions and knead the dough first with a mixer, then with your hands. This work requires a lot of physical effort, which is why men have always been attracted to it in the north. But you can do it yourself.

How much flour will be used is very individual and depends on many factors. Approximately 1.5 - 1.8 kg.

When kneading, we think only about the good, we put into the dough only positive thoughts and good wishes to those people to whom we will give gingerbread cookies. You can listen to your favorite music or read a prayer to yourself. The main thing is to knead in a good mood, thoroughly, calmly, in a state of love for the world and for the work you are currently doing.

As a result, you will get a beautiful loaf that looks like wet clay with a silky surface that is pleasant to stroke with your hand. The dough should not stick to your hands. Place the finished loaf in a plastic bag, tie the bag tightly, and put it in the refrigerator. The dough should rest in the refrigerator for one to two weeks. But if you didn’t have time to make the dough in advance, let it lie in the refrigerator for at least a day or two.

The day before baking, take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it rest at room temperature.

Second phase. Cut out gingerbread cookies from the dough and bake them

You will need: molds or cardboard templates for cutting out figures, a rolling pin.

Forms for roe deer.

You can download 65 ready-made templates for winter gingerbread cookies for free on my website “Native Path” in the article Stencils for gingerbread cookies. And also in this article you can attend a gingerbread ball in Arkhangelsk and learn how to make your own homemade gingerbread molds.

First. Cut pieces from the dough and roll them out with a rolling pin into layers 5 mm thick. We cut out figures from these layers so that the large shapes are in the center and the small ones are at the edges. We try to arrange the elements so as to use the entire layer of dough. Can be cut using metal gingerbread molds or using cardboard templates.

Second. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Place the gingerbread cookies in the oven for 5 minutes. If the gingerbread has turned a nice brown chocolate color after 5 minutes, remove it. If after 5 minutes the gingerbread has the color of creamy toffee, then you need to leave it in the oven for another 2-3 minutes.

Ready-made gingerbread cookies should be rosy, but soft inside. They will air dry for 24 hours and harden. If you keep them in the oven, they will then become hard as a rock. If you underexpose it, then the surface of the roe may wrinkle in the future and will look ugly.

Be sure to note and record the time spent baking. In the future, you can adjust it taking into account the characteristics of your oven.

The third stage is to decorate the roe deer with glaze. Roe deer painting

You will need: one egg white, whisk or mixer, one glass of powdered sugar (sifted through a sieve), 1 piece of raw beets, 1 lemon.

Please note - the powder must be without additives. If the store only sells powder with additives, then you can make powdered sugar yourself from granulated sugar using a coffee grinder. The coffee grinder starts for a few seconds several times.

First. Making white icing. To do this, beat one egg white with a mixer. Beat very thoroughly until the protein increases in size several times.

We begin to gradually add powdered sugar to the protein and continue to beat. You will get a homogeneous white glaze. To add shine to the glaze, add a few drops of lemon juice.

Second. Making pink icing.

Separate one-fourth of the glaze into a separate bowl and drip beet juice into it (grate the raw beets on a fine grater and squeeze out the juice). Stir until uniformly pink.

Third. Decorate gingerbread cookies with glaze.

Gingerbread cookies are decorated with icing using a stick, brush, toothpick, pastry bag, homemade pastry bag (fill a small plastic bag with icing, tie it, make a small hole).

The background of the gingerbread is not filled with glaze, but painted with patterns: straight and wavy lines, zigzags, curls, dots, crosses. If you need to correct the drawing, this is done with a damp brush. Excess glaze is removed from the stick or brush using water and a linen napkin.

I wish everyone creative inspiration and a pleasant New Year's mood.

The author of the article is Valasina Asya, author of the website for parents and teachers Native Path, candidate of pedagogical sciences. By profession, Asya is a teacher of preschool pedagogy and methods of speech development, candidate of pedagogical sciences and presenter of the Internet Workshop of educational games “Through play - to success!”

I thank Asya for such a master class on making Arkhangelsk gingerbread. And even though I don’t have a culinary blog, I think that such aromas always give us a good mood, something extraordinary for the soul, and this is always very important for the general atmosphere in our families. I’ll also try to find time and try to bake such gingerbread cookies for the first time in my life. And from the article, such aromas come through the monitor...

And for the sake of the soul, we will listen Giovanni Marradi Love. I think everything doesn’t need any comments. You just have to listen and watch. Have a good mood everyone.

I wish everyone a wonderful mood, such pleasant moments when you can take time and please your loved ones with culinary masterpieces, create an extraordinary atmosphere of comfort and something unique at home.

28 comments

Hope
18 Feb 2018 at 22:02

Answer

Sergey
March 31, 2017 at 23:38

Answer

Burn the sugar over low heat until brown, stirring so as not to burn.

In a separate saucepan, bring 1 cup of water to a boil. Once the sugar has melted and turned brown, very careful(water and sugar will boil violently), without bending over the frying pan!, Pour the prepared glass of boiling water in small portions and dissolve the burnt sugar. It is strictly not recommended for children under 16 years of age to do this procedure on their own!Add another 1 cup of granulated sugar and dissolve it thoroughly. You can do the opposite: boil a syrup from water and sugar and pour melted sugar into it, do as you wish, and if you don’t want to do this procedure, you can not burn the sugar, but add cocoa to the dough for color, but this will turn out to be a different recipe.

Remove the frying pan from the heat, add 150 grams of butter (or 200 grams of margarine), stir until the butter or margarine dissolves. Pour the resulting mixture into a large bowl and cool until warm. Mix 2 eggs and 2 egg yolks well with a fork and add to the cooled mixture, mix again. Then add 1/4 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of finely ground spices (a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger and cardamom (2:1:1:1:1)), and 1 teaspoon of baking soda into the mixture. (I extinguish with vinegar). Then, gradually adding flour, knead the dough so that it does not stick to your hands (800-900 grams of flour may be required).

The dough should stand in a cold place for about one day to mature (if you are in a hurry, let it stand for 1-1.5 hours at room temperature, and then put it in the freezer for 20-30 minutes).

Divide the dough into several parts, roll it out to a thickness of 5-7 mm and cut out various figures using the dough recesses. You can cut a stencil out of cardboard.

Filling glaze preparing as well.
We take our base for the glaze, transfer it to another cup and dilute it with cold water (not lemon juice), adding 1 teaspoon at a time, to such a consistency that when we run a sharp knife through our glaze, the trace of it will completely disappear as soon as we slowly count to 10. The glaze turns out like thick sour cream and is applied over the entire surface of the gingerbread.

To prepare colored glaze, first put food coloring (or beet or carrot juice) dissolved in a drop of table vinegar into the socket, then add the base and the required amount of water. For the lilac color I used 1 teaspoon of blueberry juice, and for the green I used a pinch of green food coloring diluted in 0.5 teaspoon of 9% vinegar.
The base and water should be well mixed by vigorously rubbing the mixture with a spoon along the bottom of the rosette. If there are a lot of gingerbread cookies, you can immediately prepare several bags of different colors for decoration. You can also use ready-made purchased colored glaze and immediately decorate the Arkhangelsk roe at your discretion. These are the gingerbread cookies we got.

Ecology of consumption. There are a lot of recipes for making Arkhangelsk gingerbread - roe deer. I will share one that our family uses and that my mother taught me. I have been involved in making goats since early childhood - at first I colored the goats baked by my mother, and now, as an adult, I took over the baton from my mother and bake them myself for every New Year.

There are a lot of recipes for making Arkhangelsk gingerbread - roe zul. I will share one that our family uses and that my mother taught me. I have been involved in making goats since early childhood - at first I colored the goats baked by my mother, and now, as an adult, I took over the baton from my mother and bake them myself for every New Year. This is our good northern family tradition, and I will be glad if it enters your families and fills the New Year with the feeling of an unforgettable magical winter fairy tale!

Making New Year's Arkhangelsk gingerbread cookies is a very long process that includes three stages:

1. Preparing the test.

2. Baking.

3. Decorating baked gingerbread cookies with glaze.

Each of these stages cannot be done in a hurry or in the course of ordinary affairs - nothing will work. Your attitude will affect the quality of the gingerbread. Before the start of each stage, you need to smile, free yourself from unnecessary thoughts and worries, fully concentrate on this creative process, and during the creation of the gingerbread be in a peaceful state. For example, silently - silently - read prayers or say good wishes to those people to whom you will give gingerbread cookies. Then the roes will bring only joy, health and happiness. And your reward will be the smiles of those to whom you give them, as well as the unique taste and beauty of the resulting gingerbread cookies, harmony and peace in your home.

Make the dough when no one will disturb you or distract you - in our family it was always late in the evening, when the children were sleeping. The dough is made by adults without the participation of children, since this process is very difficult and requires care and precision. But cutting out roe deer using cutters and decorating them with icing is something we can do together with the children as a family!

First stage. Making dough for roe deer

To make the dough you will need:

3-3.5 cups of granulated sugar, a glass of chilled boiled water, about 2 kg of flour (it must be sifted through a sieve), a pack of 200 -250 g. butter or high-quality butter margarine (preferably made with butter), 2 eggs, 1 tbsp. baking soda slaked with vinegar, spices for gingerbread (ground cloves, cinnamon, ginger, coriander).

How to make the dough:

Step 1. Pour 2-2.5 cups of granulated sugar into 1 cup of chilled boiled water and place on low heat. Prepare the syrup.

Cut the butter into small pieces.

Step 2. At the same time, on another burner in a metal pan, burn 1 cup of granulated sugar until brown. We do this over low heat with constant stirring. It is best to stir with either the handle of a metal spoon or a knife (to prevent the sugar from sticking). The sugar will first melt to a brown liquid, then foam will appear, it will boil and smoke. Let it simmer a little, turn off the burner and immediately proceed to step 3.

Step 3. Pour the burnt sugar into the syrup in a thin stream while constantly stirring the resulting mixture with a spoon. We do this very slowly and carefully, without haste.

Step 4. Add the butter cut into pieces to the resulting mixture and mix until a homogeneous liquid is obtained. We put it on the balcony or outside the window to cool.

While the mixture is cooling to a warm state in the cold, soak the dishes, otherwise the sugar will harden and will be difficult to wash. And then we prepare the dough.

Step 5. Place spices to taste in another large saucepan. We usually put two tablespoons of spices: 1 tbsp. l. ground cinnamon and 1 tbsp. ground cloves. We buy whole cloves and grind them ourselves immediately before making gingerbread cookies - it turns out more fragrant than ready-made ground cloves sold in stores. You can use other spices - ginger, coriander or a ready-made spice mixture for gingerbread.

Step 6. Place 1 tablespoon of baking soda in the same pan (quench it with vinegar).

Step 7. Beat 2 eggs with a mixer or whisk. Add to the same pan.

And then pour the warm liquid into this pan, which we put in the cold to cool in step 4. Mix everything thoroughly.

Step 8. Knead the dough. Start adding flour to the pan. We note the time on the timer, since you need to spend at least an hour on the kneading. Be sure to sift the flour through a sieve before kneading. Add flour in very small portions, mix with a spoon or mixer. It is difficult to predict how much flour you will need, you need to feel it - but approximately 1.5-1.8 kg.

When the dough becomes stiff enough, we begin to knead it not with a mixer, but by hand. Knead for exactly an hour. If even after half an hour it seems to you that the dough is ready, continue kneading it anyway. Dough made incorrectly will crack during baking. When kneading, we put our positive thoughts into our living dough, we say good wishes to ourselves to those people who will eat these gingerbread cookies, we read prayers - that is, we do everything that will help you bring yourself into a state of calm, joy and gratitude to the world, nature, gratitude to your family and loved ones.

Kneading dough requires a lot of physical effort, so men have long been involved in this task.

After an hour of thoroughly kneading the dough, you will get a beautiful loaf of uniform, dense consistency. It looks like wet clay with a silky glossy surface that is very pleasant to stroke with your hand. The dough should not stick to your hands. Wrap the dough in a bag, tie the bag and place the dough in the refrigerator on the bottom shelf. The dough should rest in the cold for 2 weeks. If you did not have time to make the dough in advance, then let it lie in the cold for at least a day.

A small addition: my mother did not and does not have a clear initially specified proportion of products in the roe dough - she “felt” it (like my grandmother) and did a lot “by instinct.” For example, sometimes I put not 2 eggs in the dough, but 3 eggs. And I took 3/4 teaspoon of soda. Sometimes it took 1.5 kg of flour, sometimes 1.8 kg - this was not measured by scales. and was determined by its consistency. But this is already “aerobatics” for which you need experience in baking roe deer. At the initial stage, it is better to make the dough according to the same recipe many times.

Second phase. Cut out roe deer from the dough and bake

To bake gingerbread cookies you will need: molds or cardboard templates for cutting out figures, a rolling pin.

You can download 65 ready-made templates for gingerbread cookies for free in the article “Stencils for gingerbread cookies” on my website “Native Path” - http://rodnaya-tropinka.ru/trafarety-dlya-pryanikov/. And also in this article you can attend a gingerbread ball and see real northern roes of fabulous beauty.

Step 1. Take the dough out of the cold in advance and let it warm up at room temperature for 8-12 hours.

Step 2. Cut pieces from the dough and roll them out with a rolling pin into layers approximately 5 mm thick, no more.

Step 3. Using a cardboard template or using ready-made forms, cut out the figures. We place large figures in the center of the layer, and small ones on the sides. We try to arrange the figures so as to use the entire area of the dough layer.

Step 4. Bake the roe in the oven at 180 degrees for about 5 minutes (the exact time depends on the characteristics of your oven).

How can you tell if the gingerbread is baked?

If after 5 minutes of baking the gingerbread has the color of creamy toffee, then it is not ready yet, and you still need to keep it in the oven for another 2 minutes. If after 5 minutes of baking the gingerbreads have the brown color of milk chocolate, then they are already ready and can be taken out from the oven.

It is necessary to take into account that the gingerbread cookies that you remove from the oven will be slightly soft, but at the same time rosy. The gingerbread cookies will still ripen - air dry for 24 hours. And then they will become more solid. Place the baked gingerbread cookies on a hard surface and let them sit for a day.

In my modern oven, baking at 180 degrees with ventilation takes 7 minutes, not 5 minutes - like in my mother's oven. Here you need to try and notice the specific “your” time and write it down in your roe recipe for the future.

If you leave the gingerbread cookies in the oven, within a day they will become hard as a rock. If they are not kept in the oven enough, the surface of the roe will subsequently wrinkle and look ugly and uneven. Each oven has its own “character” - so be sure to note the time your roes were in the oven during your first bake. And then for the future, either remember it (if everything works out well) or correct it.

Supplement as an option. In our family, it is customary to bake gingerbread cookies with a matte surface, as I described above. If you want to get gingerbread cookies with a glossy surface, then before baking they need to be greased with yolk or yolk, diluted and mixed well with 1 tablespoon of water. My mother sometimes greased the surface of the gingerbread with one egg white. Try different options and choose the one you like best.

Third stage. Decorate the roe with glaze

For the glaze you will need: 1 egg white, 1 lemon, 1 raw beet, 1 cup powdered sugar (pre-sieve through a sieve). You can buy powder or make it yourself from granulated sugar.

Step 1. Using a mixer or whisk, beat one egg white. You need to beat very carefully, as poorly beaten egg whites will create bubbles when decorating the gingerbread.

Step 2. Gradually add powdered sugar to the egg whites in small portions and continue beating. The result was white glaze.

Step 3. Add a few drops of lemon juice into the glaze. Lemon juice is added to give the glaze shine and a slightly sour taste. The white icing is ready.

Separate ¼ of the glaze into a separate bowl and prepare the pink glaze in it.

Step 4. Prepare pink glaze. To do this, grind a piece of raw beets on a fine grater, squeeze out the juice and add a few drops of this juice to the bowl for the pink glaze. Stir. Add beet juice until desired pink color is achieved.

Nowadays food coloring is also added to obtain a variety of glaze colors, but we never use them at home and decorate gingerbread cookies only with traditional colors - white and pink - and only using natural products.

Step 5. Decorate the gingerbread cookies.

Children are traditionally involved in decorating gingerbread cookies - from very young children to teenagers. This is a very exciting creative process!

In northern gingerbread, they usually do not fill the background with spots of glaze, but draw patterns on it - straight lines, wavy lines, curls, dots, crosses, zigzags.

You can paint with icing on the surface of gingerbread cookies using:

A) sticks (since childhood I painted with the opposite sharp end of a wooden brush), often dipping it into the glaze and wiping the excess glaze from it with a linen napkin while working,

B) a regular painting brush with natural bristles.

C) you can pour the glaze into a small plastic bag, make a hole in the corner and draw with it like a culinary bag,

D) for thin lines use a wooden toothpick,

D) using a ready-made pastry bag for decorating cakes and pastries.

These are the methods that we use. Even when I was very little, I never drew on roe deer with my fingers - this is not customary here. Little children decorate roe deer with a stick, putting large dots and drawing large lines. If you draw with your finger, the roe deer will come out clumsy, sloppy, not ours, not northern. If you need to correct something, then wet the painting brush in a glass of water and remove excess water from the brush using a linen napkin. And use a damp brush to correct the contours of the design.

A little trick: if you want the glaze to turn out snowy, then sprinkle the gingerbread with sugar immediately after painting, when the glaze has not yet dried. When the glaze hardens, shake off the sugar. You will get a shaggy and fluffy pattern on your roe like snow.

Have fun and enjoy your creativity!

And at the end of the article - a little about the history of these gingerbread cookies from Stepan Pisakhov’s article “About roe deer”

About roe deer

“The passing of the old way of life takes with it the mystery of the origin of the Christmas roe. It has long been a tradition to bake roe for Christmas. But why are they only baked for Christmas? And where does this name come from - roe deer? These are questions to this day... Our ethnographers ignored them, apparently because they came to Arkhangelsk in the summer, when there are no roe deer. I'll try to say a few words about roe deer. Maybe someone will respond and it will be possible to find out the beginning of the roe.

The most ancient roe deer - Kholmogory and Mezen - are made of black dough, sometimes colored with white dough. Kholmogory roe deer resemble a deer in appearance. A figure on four legs, a head, a bush of branched horns, apples on the horns, birds on the apples, or rather bird wings, made of white dough (an apple with wings resembles the image of a winged sun) is sculpted from dough. And the whole roe seems to have been transported from a very ancient pagan world. One can see some kind of occult recording in this strangely beautiful figure. The size of such a roe is 5-6 inches. Smaller roe deer are made without apples on the horns, but only with birds (the birds resemble hands with outstretched fingers). They bake roe deer in small sizes - about an inch, simplified in design, or they try to make them resemble a cow, a horse (sometimes with a rider on a horse). Professor Zelinsky in 1913 noticed that these small roes are very similar in shape and size to the figures of the Stone Age.

In the Mezen district, in addition to small ones like the Kholmogory ones, they also bake flat roes: they roll out the dough into a long ribbon half the thickness of a pencil and roll it up in different patterns, sometimes unexpectedly resembling a sacred lotus in a wavy environment reminiscent of radiance. There are also birds on the nest and others.

In the spring of 1914, at my request, the old woman undertook to cook roe. She rolled out threads from the dough and began to fold the pattern, whispering something. I asked: “What are you whispering, grandma?” The old woman stopped and said sternly: “Don’t knock them down if you need the roe.” I don’t know whether the old woman’s whispering had anything to do with the roe deer. The old woman did not explain. Others made the excuse of ignorance.

In Arkhangelsk, roe deer are baked from gingerbread dough, cut into iron molds (gingerbread silhouettes) and decorated (cut) with sugar glaze, white and colored (usually pink), generously covered with “gold” and “sprinkles”. Forms made of iron, sometimes quite thick, are preserved for a long time, passing from generation to generation. Through questioning, we were able to establish that the forms were up to 200 years old, but, undoubtedly, there are forms that are much older. U El. Pet. P-shaped from her mother, grandmother, etc. Also, other masters of rozul have the most ancient drawings that have come down to us. Kozulniks and Kozulniks often do not know how to draw with a pencil at all, but will take a stick or tube with icing and, using the silhouette of a gingerbread, repeating what they have seen and adopted from their elders, they will create amazingly beautiful drawings.

In 1913 or 1914, I saw a roe woman at the market with a roe depicting an eagle. On his chest is the letter “A” and one stick (Alexander 1). He asked her: “Why do you have the letter “A” on your eagle and one stick? You need “N” and two sticks.” And I heard in response: “But because it’s necessary. My mother and my grandmother made the letter “A” and one stick - that means that’s how it should be. What kind of pointer were you looking for?” Forms in confectionery shops undergo changes. There, craftsmen come up with new forms and become more sophisticated in the intricacies of cutting, paying little attention to established designs.

Baking of roe deer begins in October. At the beginning of December, roe deer appear in bakeries and pastry shops. In mid-December, all the windows and shelves of bakeries and pastry shops are filled with them. The size of the roe is from one and a half to 10-12 vershok. Their cost ranges from a penny to a ruble, and more elaborate confectionery products cost up to 10 rubles or more.

Before Christmas, roe deer fill the market. Roe deer traders line up in rows and unfold their boxes - offering customers a wide choice. A huge number of parcels with roe deer were sent throughout Russia and abroad.

Much in the Arkhangelsk province has been preserved from very ancient times. It seems to me that the roe deer of Kholmogory and Mezen (and in a number of other districts) are the heritage of the local pioneers. It is possible that the Novgorodians and Muscovites who came here brought gingerbread with them. And from the ancient roe made of black dough and from gingerbread our roe could emerge. But perhaps gingerbread was brought to the North by foreigners and adapted instead of pagan cookies for the Christian holiday.

Drawings of the most ancient forms - a star, an angel, a shepherd, a basket (with gifts), birds, animals close to humans, a Christmas tree, grapes, vases with flowers, a deer with a sleigh, a lion (the lion is like the king of animals, and maybe this was influenced by English or Norwegian). Later roe deer - Amazon, cabman, dog with a booth, cat. And those that have appeared over the past decades - a steamboat, a steam locomotive, a cyclist, an airplane. And after 1920 - the hammer and sickle and the grandfather with the slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!” In 1925, I saw at the market a roe deer with the image of a new eagle: the shape of the gingerbread is the same as before, only on the eagle’s chest there is a sickle and a hammer, the cross is cut off, and on the crown is “RSFSR”.

Last year, in 1926, I met N.D. Vinogradov in Moscow, who had collected a large and, it seems, the only collection of gingerbread cookies in Russia as examples of folk art. Seeing how N.D. Vinogradov lovingly and attentively treats this type of folk art, I set myself the task of collecting as complete a collection of roe deer for him as possible. And perhaps, with the help of N.D. Vinogradov and other smart people, it will be possible to find out their origin.

From the collection of Pisakhov S.G. Fairy tales, Essays, Letters. / Ser. Russian North. - Arkhangelsk, North-Western book publishing house, 1985. published

Everyone knows from childhood what gingerbread is. We suggest making them yourself, using the “Roe” gingerbread recipe as a basis.

Ingredients:

For the test:

1. Butter – 1 pack (200 g)

3. Eggs - 3 pcs.

4. Sugar – 2 tbsp

5. Water – 3/4 tbsp

6. Salt – 1 pinch

7. Soda – 1 tsp.

8. Mixture of spices (ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom) – 3 tsp.

For glaze (icing):

1. Powdered sugar – 200 g

2. Egg – 1 pc.

Cooking method:

1. First, cook the caramel. To do this, it is better to take a saucepan or saucepan with a thick bottom. Pour 1 cup of sugar into it and put on low heat. The sugar must be stirred so that it does not burn. After the sugar has turned dark brown, you need to very carefully pour boiling water into it.

The mixture must be stirred. When the mixture is homogeneous, add the rest of the sugar and keep it on the fire until it dissolves. Then remove from the stove.

2. While the mass is hot, add butter to it.

3. When stirring, a homogeneous mass is obtained - this is creamy caramel.

4. Spices are usually mixed in equal proportions. They are also added to the still hot caramel and mixed thoroughly. Next, the mixture is left to cool.

5. Beat 1 egg and 2 yolks in a bowl.

6. The egg mixture is mixed with warm caramel.

7. Add salt and soda to the resulting mixture.

8. Then gradually introduce . To begin with, it is better to use a whisk.

9. As the mass thickens, you will have to take a tablespoon.

10. You need to knead the dough until it becomes homogeneous and stops sticking to your hands.

11. Form a block from the dough, wrap it in plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator for about a day.

12. The finished block is cut into pieces.

14. Then cut out the gingerbread cookies. To do this, you can use special molds or make templates yourself.

15. If templates are used, they are placed on a layer of dough and cut along the contour with a sharp knife.

16. Baking paper is placed on a baking sheet, and the blanks are placed on it. Gingerbread cookies are baked in a well-heated oven at a temperature of 200-220 degrees for about 5-7 minutes.

17. I made two types of gingerbread, so when the first batch of roes is ready, I put a second batch of a different type in the oven.

18. After the gingerbread cookies are taken out of the oven, they need to cool. If desired, you can make holes in some of them and use them as decorations for the Christmas tree.

19. While the gingerbread cookies are cooling, you can prepare the glaze (icing). To do this, beat the egg white with powdered sugar with a mixer or whisk. The resulting glaze is placed in a pastry syringe or bag and the gingerbread cookies are painted. You can add different dyes to the glaze, then the gingerbread cookies will turn out even more attractive and picturesque. I hope you liked the “Roe” gingerbread recipe.

Additional Information:

Almost everyone associates gingerbread with Tula, which is famous for these culinary products. However, the Arkhangelsk region is rightfully proud of its roe deer. They got their name from the Pomeranian word meaning “curl” or “snake”. Usually these are figures of animals, trees or houses, decorated with multi-colored glaze.

These gingerbread cookies were baked for New Year's or family holidays, such as a wedding or the birth of a child. Over time, they began to decorate New Year trees with roe deer. According to beliefs, such roes were supposed to bring wealth and prosperity to the house.