I love soft gingerbread. But it has to be soft.
Those are really neat!
I have a partial recipe - I’m sure Grandma never wrote it down, but I guess my aunt took a stab at it:
1 cup oleo
1 cup water
1 cup sorghum molasses
1 cup light brown sugar
1 tablespoon soda
1/2 teaspoon ginger
vanilla
enough flour to barely roll out
cut in strips and bake on cookie sheet at 350 - they rise on touch.
So, ballpark on amount of flour? What should the finished dough look like - thicker than pancake batter, but not as thick as peanut butter?
I’m one of the three or four people in North America who loves fruitcake. My daughter loves it too, so we fight over it.
And I’ve been to Nuremburg (Nuernberg) for REAL lebkuchen. OMG. I’d kill for that now.
~VOW
Both of these are high on my Christmas list. For Pfeffernuss i prefer the type with the hard frosting rather than the one with the powdered sugar.
Jingles cookies, although I haven’t been able to find them anywhere this year. 
My grammy always had a couple of boxes ready for me when I went to visit.
My grandfather always used to make some really great **divinity **around Christmas.
I also forgot to mention mincemeat pie. I probably like it so much because it REMINDS me of fruitcake!
Alas, I don’t even bother with buying it any more. Since nobody else really cares for it, I’m NOT buying a whole pie that will scream at me from the refrigerator, “Yoo HOO, VOW! It’s MINCEMEAT! You KNOW you love it!”
I hate screaming food.
~VOW
I’m one of the others! I love fruitcake. The store bought stuff is chancy in quality, but the stuff from The Collins Street Bakery in Corsicana Texas is great.
But my mother and I actually MAKE fruitcake. We use a recipe that my paternal grandmother saved from a newspaper in Buffalo New York, some time in the 1940’s. No alcohol, but lots of fruit and nuts.
Do you make fruitcake VOW?
Peanut brittle is my fave. I have a great recipe for making it in the microwave and it’s almost as good as the old fashioned kind. Also, Mexican wedding cakes, chocolate fudge with walnuts, and buckeyes.
Me, too. I’ve looked in northern Illinois and central Illinois, but no Jingles.
I haven’t seen a tin of Danish butter cookies or a Terry’s chocolate orange yet this year. I’m worried.
Cookies or cake/loaf? I have an awesome soft ginger cookie recipe, and just made a wonderful pumpkin gingerbread loaf from Simply Recipes (on my phone or I’d link).
I love fruitcake also. Maybe I’ll make a poll. VOW have you considered making your own mincemeat? My aunt does and freezes it (and if I quit being so lazy I would too) and when she wants can thaw some out and makes tarts. Might be easier than having a whole pie screaming at you.
JayJay, I’ve seen chocolate oranges but I’ve avoided the seasonal aisle so I haven’t seen Danish butter cookies either.
To Baker:
I tried making fruitcake once, but since I didn’t have the right pans, it was pretty much a bust.
One year, my aunt decided to make every single fruitcake recipe she could find. OMG, here it is, forty years later, and I still obsess on that one holiday season! Most of the cakes were similar, but two stood out because they were so DIFFERENT from the others.
Chocolate fruitcake: The cake batter itself was a dense chocolalte cake. The dried/candied fruit assortment included big, fat dark raisins (Muscat?), figs, diced prunes, and candied cherries. Just describing it makes me want a slab with a huge cup of coffee…
Hawaiian fruitcake: A white batter, no real spices to mention, and the dried/candied fruits included candied pineapple, candied cherries, coconut and I THINK macadamia nuts.
DAYAM. How do you get drool out of a keyboard???
~VOW
That seems like a lot of water to me, in relation to the amounts of the other ingredients. That being said, my guess, based on that ingredient list, is that the oleo and sugar should be creamed; then add the water, vanilla and molasses and mix well again. Combine 2 1/2 cups of flour, the ginger and soda and then mix into your wet ingredients. If needed, add more flour, just a 1/8 cup at a time, until it comes together for rolling. That means just until you can roll small balls in your hands without it sticking to you. Err on the side of sticky, because you’ll be adding more flour when you roll them out.
For me, Christmas isn’t Christmas without the homemade stuff. I could happily live without the holiday-themed store-bought stuff forever, but a single season without the fudge, iced sugar cookies shaped like snowmen and stars, Chrusciki, buckeyes, spritz, no-bakes, church windows, rum-rings and mince pie would be wrong. I don’t even like and/or eat half of them, but something about seeing them all spread out on the table makes the holiday hit home for me.
Bless you, belladonna! I’ll give it a shot.