I totally didn’t mean to leave for the holiday without even saying “Merry Christmas”!  It’s been an odd year, and I even skipped the Christmas cookie swap.  Then my family realized that this meant there were no cookies to serve for our family gatherings.  My sister thought it would be fun to make some gingerbread men with my nephews, and a new holiday tradition was born.

She made the dough using this recipe and brought over some cookie cutters.  We had to let the dough warm up for quite a bit before we could roll it out, but after that, it was all hands on deck.  We rolled, we cut, and we scooped the cookies onto the baking sheets.  Then we pulled up the scraps and rolled some more.  We decorated the cookies with raisins and chocolate chips before baking, and this may have been my older nephew’s favorite part!

After the cookies were out of the oven, we let them cool, and then decorated them with icing.  The recipe above includes icing directions, but we used store-bought icing tubes which were a good time saver.  Santa still had a lot of things to do!  Even my younger nephew got to play with some cookies and icing.

This was a fun project, and the cookies tasted really good!  The thin cookies got nice and crispy, and the thicker cookies were a bit softer.  Unless you roll the dough more consistently than we did, you’ll have a variety.  It may be too late for you to make gingerbread men this holiday season, but we’ll come back to this project again next year.

• Cookies and Bars