Dairy, Gluten & Egg Free Gingerbread Men - Diet Friendly Fridays

Hello Everybody!
I hope you've all had a good week and you're now ready for some weekend baking! This month's Diet Friendly Friday post is for a classic treat; gingerbread men. As you can see from the title, this recipe contains no gluten, dairy or eggs, I want to say that it's also vegan but as it contains honey I'm not quite sure that I can make that claim. This recipe is sure to bring back some fond childhood memories of munching on gingerbread men
So let's get started...

You will need:

• 275g ground almonds
• 1tsp ground ginger
• half tsp baking powder
• 6 dates, chopped into quarters
• 3tbsp olive oil
• 40g honey
• 1tsp vanilla essence
• half a mashed banana
• gingerbread man cookie cutter
• 75g icing sugar
• 4tsp water

1.  Preheat your oven to 170°C and line a baking tray with some silicone paper

2. Place the almonds, ginger, baking powder and dates into a food processor and blend until the ingredients have combined just a little

3. Add the olive oil, honey, vanilla and banana. Blend in the food processor until a dough forms. I used my NutriBullet to make the dough but I'm pretty sure it would also work using a handheld mixer

4. Place a sheet of silicone paper on your surface. Place the dough onto the sheet and knead it a bit to make sure that all the ingredients have combined

5. Roll out the dough and start cutting out your gingerbread men!

6. This dough doesn't spread so feel free to place the men fairly close together. Pop them into the oven for about 10-15minutes, checking that the bottom of them is golden brown before you remove them from the oven

I managed to get 22 gingerbread men from this recipe but it all depends on the size of your cookie cutter

7. When the biscuits are cooling on a wire rack, you can make the icing

8. Add one teaspoon of water at a time to the icing sugar, mixing after each addition. You want the icing thick enough to be able to pipe with it, and I found that 4tsp of water achieved this consistency

9. Fill your piping bag with the icing and let your creativity run wild! I chose to make these gingerbread men decorative biscuits as opposed to giving them the traditional face and clothes. To do this I simply outlined each biscuit and then filled the biscuits with any design I could think of

And you're done!
I hope you enjoyed this Diet Friendly Friday post and I would love to see what gingerbread men designs you come up with. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week :)