Gingerbread love tokens

Gingerbread is a broad term, warmly embracing everything from crisp biscuits to darkly sticky cakes. Across centuries and across Europe it has taken many delicious guises, the only prerequisites being sweetness and spice - and the spice doesn’t even have to include ginger.

British gingerbreads, with all their many regional variations, tend to lead with it; in Dutch speculaas it falls into second place to other sweet spices; whilst French pain d’epices omits it entirely in favour of