Gingerbread Spice Mix

Author Notes

Why would you need to make gingerbread spice mix? For nothing and everything. All spiced recipes—from pumpkin bread to molasses cookies to yes, gingerbread—will call for a blend of spices such as ground cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves. You can follow each recipe, customizing it with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, or you can make this all-purpose spice mix. It’s made with all of the aforementioned ingredients, as well as a little bit of freshly ground black pepper. It’s more ginger-forward than pumpkin pie spice, which generally is made predominantly with cinnamon, and in fact boasts equal parts of ginger and cinnamon. I tested it with pancake mix, and our test kitchen used it in place of all of the spices called for in a loaf of pumpkin bread. The results were doubly delicious.

So can you use this mix in place of the ground spices called for in our Gingerbread Cookie recipe? Let’s take a peek: Our recipe calls for 4 teaspoons of ground ginger and 3/4 teaspoon ground cloves. Go ahead and swap the two ingredients here for the same amount of spice mix for a well-balanced cookie.

You know where this blend would work really well? Carolina Gelen’s Gingerbread Sweet Rolls, which call for ground cinnamon, ground ginger, ground cardamom, grated nutmeg, and ground cloves. (Sounds like a winning combination to me!) The one addition you’d need to introduce for the sweet rolls is fresh orange zest, which lends a little brightness as a foil to all those warm spices.
—Kelly Vaughan