Grantham Gingerbread cuts festive treat

Grantham Gingerbread has launched a festive treat in time for Christmas.

The iconic family company, based on London Road, has made gingerbread Christmas trees.

Business owner Alastair Hawken said: “This is the first season we have been cutting and baking these. Gingerbread is an all-year-round product but none more so than Christmas.

“It’s great to produce Christmas shapes and we have produced Christmas trees.”

Alastair told the Journal this week: “The trees we have been baking today are going to a Caribbean cruise liner. They will be some of the lovely things the passengers will open on Christmas Day.”

The Grantham Gingerbread Christmas trees will also be available in all Lincolnshire Co-op stores along with farm shops and delis across Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.

“We have made 300,000 pieces. We are almost through our Christmas. We started at the beginning of September and we will be finishing in two weeks. Then, we have to think about Easter.”

The Christmas trees use a special Christmas recipe, which is heavy on the cloves to add a bit of spice.

It forms one of five gingerbreads that the Hawken family make.

The others are chocolate orange, Italian lemon, original, and Grantham gingerbread, the latter of which is noted for its lighter colour, not using molasses. All the biscuits, including trees, are lovingly made by hand in small batches that are weighed and measured just as they were in 1740 when the famous Grantham Gingerbread was first made.

Then, a Grantham baker called William Egglestone accidentally mistook one ingredient for another when making Grantham Whetstone, a hard flat biscuit, which were the first forms of biscuits ever offered for sale.

Instead, Mr Egglestone created the white domed biscuits known for their honeycomb centre with a delicate gingery flavour and thus the product known as Grantham Gingerbread was born.