Gingerbread: a quintessential of the holiday season. I haven’t made gingerbread cookies in a long time, but was keeping my nieces this weekend and thought it would be a fun thing to do together. It’s important to use the right recipe for cookies that you use cookie cutters on so I went to my trusted resource: America’s Test Kitchen.

As far as cookie recipes go, this is pretty standard and easy. The only reason I gave it a 7 for time spent was because you must let it chill before rolling out so it’s not super quick but definitely worth the wait! I was a little concerned about whether making gingerbread cookies was a good idea when both nieces declared that it smelled weird after we put the molasses in. We finished putting everything in and wrapped the divided dough in plastic wrap to rest in the fridge for a bit.

Knowing we didn’t need a ton of cookies around the house I actually only made cookies from one batch of the divided dough and left the rest to finish a few days later. That’s the nice thing about a recipe like this, especially if you’re making cookies to take fresh to others. We cheated a little and used a variety of cookie cutters but the majority were gingerbread men. 🙂

I used confectioners sugar instead of flour to roll out the dough on before cutting the cookies out. You do have to be careful because at first the dough will be really firm, but if you leave it out too long before using it’ll be too sticky. If it takes a while to roll out and cut out then put the remainder back in the fridge so it can firm back up; otherwise you’ll have gingerbread dough everywhere and it’ll be hard to get them off the counter. A few of ours are a little deformed for this very reason but they weren’t too bad so I decided to go ahead and bake them.

These turned out really cute once done and the taste really good as well. I decided not to make my own royal icing so we had a fun (and messy!) time decorating. I’m still working on my decorating skills using royal icing so please ignore the fact that these look a little sad, but this was definitely a hit that tasted good too!

Baking Ease	9
Time Spent	7
Taste	8
Visual	8

Recipe Used: America’s Test Kitchen