Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Gingerbread Man Cookie Ornaments


This December I became a bit concerned about how to decorate the Christmas tree because we have a large collection of glass ornaments. And now that Naomi is a toddler, and that she gets into EVERYTHING, I feared for her safety with a tree full of glass ornaments and I did not like the idea of only decorating half the tree. Instead I opted for something we could decorate with while also involving Naomi with the process, and gingerbread man cookies came to the rescue.


When I was young I would make Christmas decorations with gingerbread. The decorations always smelled so good and looked so festive, so it seemed like a good idea for this year.

I adapted the Honey-Spice Gingerbread Cookie recipe from this December's Martha Stewart Living magazine to meet Naomi's dietary needs by removing the dairy and tree nut ingredients and substituting palm oil shortening.

The recipe calls for a lot of steps in the rolling out phase, which I did not do for the sake of saving some time. The cookies still cut well and kept their shape, so if you try this recipe you may also want to do this to cut your time down some.





Naomi loved icing the cookies and really loves to eat the cookies.  Some mornings the first thing she does is walk up to the tree and take a cookie down for a bite or two.  So some of the poor gingerbread man cookies have little bites taken out of them...




4 comments:

Elizabeth Seaver said...

What a wonderful post, Liz! My kids are so grown up now, we don't do these things anymore. Maybe I'll see if they want make gingerbread cookie decorations this year.

eLIZabeth Floyd said...

Glad you like the idea Elizabeth! It really is a fun and simple way to decorate and the plus side is you get yummy cookies and the house smells Devine :)

Maria Bennett Hock said...

The tree looks great and I love seeing the process. What a great solution to your decorating dilemma!

Woodside Park said...

Hi, Liz ~
Naomi is growing SOOOO big!! I love that she helped make those adorable gingerbread ornaments. I hope this will be a Christmas family tradition for you all.
Happy Holidays!
Hope to see you real soon ~
Warmly,
Loi