The gingerbread man has been a Christmas tradition for ages. Mothers and children bake gingerbread cookies for Santa and lay them out on their porch to express gratitude (that’s if the batch remains untouched). Baking gingerbread men can be really tricky, but not if you follow these tips and use our recipe. Enjoy!
1. The most common mistake people make when baking gingerbread is rolling out the dough before refrigerating it. If you refrigerate it for an hour, the dough will be easier to work with.
2. Prepare your surface by dusting flour on to it or rolling out the dough on parchment paper to prevent the dough from sticking on to the surface.
3. Prepare your cookie cutters. Oil them or dust them with flour to prevent them from sticking to the dough and to make cutting easier.
4. When transferring the cut cookies (especially the large ones) on to a baking tray, don't remove from parchment paper, instead cut the cookie dough into the desired shape, remove the extra dough, and slide the parchment paper on to the baking sheet in the tray.
5. Cool the gingerbread before decorating to prevent the icing from running.
6. To facilitate decorating the cookies, add a little powdered sugar and milk. Flavor extracts and citrus zests can be used to enhance the flavor.
7. For decoration use icing that is colored with liquid/paste food colors.
8. Add your decorations BEFORE the icing dries. Decorations used can be colored sugar sprinkles, coconut, almonds, edible glitter, raisins and currants, and button candies.
9. Leave the icing to harden and set for at least 2 hours. Manipulating the icing before that will ruin the cookie decoration.
10. Cookies can be baked a week ahead of Christmas if stored in an airtight container and spearted by sheets of waxed paper.
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