Tomorrow is Valentines Day and I will be baking an amazing vegan and totally gluten-free chocolate cake to celebrate. The cake everyone is asking me about and here at my home everyone is waiting for and making plans for the next baking session due to any (I mean ANY!) possible occasion. The recipe I will share with you one day because it’s literally incredible – simple, quick, mouth-watering dessert and incredibly beautiful as an object with a very pleasant finish effect.

But today I want to share with you this one…as it’s freezing cold outside and if you are lucky you can still enjoy some snow. One of my preferred smells of winter, snowy and short days, family gatherings and evenings spent on playing family games. Laughs and smiles. And the omnipresent scent of cinnamon, anise, coriander, cardamom …. ah. How can you stop with them just right after the Christmas period? If you like the spices mix of gingerbread you will use it – as I do, during the wintertime with pleasure to smell the perfume of delicious aromas all over your home.

Incredible how much sense of calmness and warmth can give you any delicious treat with an intense and decisive aroma of spices – first of all, the ginger powder, followed by cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg and all the rest needed to complete the perfect ‘potion’. I can suggest any gingerbread spices mix like Simply Organic Pumpkin Spice, Certified Organic or you can just prepare your own one! In my kitchen, I often mix spices myself to suit our family’s tastes, but when I have to rely on ready-made preparations, personally I recommend the one put together by allerFeinst! named proudly Omas Wintergehemnis – Lebkuchen-Gewürzmischung.

I bet you are curious how buckwheat can be possibly tasty in a sweet version. Moreover as a base of gingerbread dough. Buckwheat, which is everything but wheat, belongs to what is defined as pseudocereals like amaranth and quinoa. Buckwheat flour is a product often highly sought after by those who practice alternative diets such as macrobiotic one and also by celiacs, given its characteristics. Anyway, this particular flour is very different and difficult if you want to use it in any preparations but extremely precious because of the high levels of selenium, zinc and magnesium it contains.
It has a poor capacity in gas retention and it’s scarcely available to work with yeasts, which actually inhibits leavening, or at least limits it a lot. But in our case, it doesn’t really matter.

Like the view above? Well…here you have the list of all you need to try! It’s really just a few ingredients!

Ingredients:
180 g of buckwheat flour
80 g of rice or almond flour
140 g of cold plant-based butter – not melted!
120 g of brown or coconut blossom sugar

1 tbs of spices mix
1 whole egg
a pinch of salt
1tbs vanilla extract

Preparation:

First of all mix together all dry ingredients – flour, sugar, spices. Once it’s mixed well place the cold butter and knead vigorously for a few seconds until it forms a sand-like textured dough. You can do it using a kitchen robot or simply by hand. Finally, add the egg.

Work it with your hands for a few seconds until you get a soft dough. Form a ball, seal it and let it rest in the fridge for at least 1 hour.

Roll it out o to a thickness of around 5 mm. The pastry should be cold when you cut out the cookies. Place them gently on the parchment paper and make them rest in the fridge once again for about 10 minutes. Take them out just shortly before baking – preheat the oven up to 180°C. In a hot static oven, it takes circa 13 minutes until they are golden brown.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool completely before tasting or decorating them. You can use chocolate or icing sugar to make them more desirable. But I can guarantee you that even in a ‘naked’ version this spiced buckwheat cookies are super favour-some! You can store the simple version in a dry place for about 20 days and the stuffed or chocolate decorated ones around 3 days (if they’ll survive!).