Gingerbread Men Cookies ~ A Fun Holiday Activity for Kids

Tis the cookie season and the first batch we made this year was Gingerbread Men cookies. I wasn't sure how my girls would like them, but I knew they would enjoy making and decorating them.

I have been looking for inexpensive Christmas activities to do with the kids for the month of December. This idea came to me as I was leafing through a holiday magazine. I knew my kids would enjoy decorating the cookies.

I didn't own a gingerbread man cookie cutter, so I bought one at Michael's where coupons are abundant.

I used this simple recipe to whip up the batter, although there was a four hour gap between making the dough and baking because the dough had to be refrigerated. My oldest had a hard time understanding that since all she wanted to do was decorate the cookies.

Finally it was time to cut and bake the cookies. I have a hard time with a rolling pin most times, but this dough was easy. It just needed a lot of extra flour and to be kept cold.

It was finally time to decorate. I used this recipe for the royal icing. It does call for an ingredient that I didn't have: Meringue powder. I found it at Michael's and used a coupon. The icing was so easy to use that I will probably use this recipe for our Gingerbread houses that we are going to decorate next week, so this powder will not go to waste for me.

I used sandwich bags to pipe the icing, which was easy for little hands to maneuver.


We topped the cookies with M&Ms, which was probably my baby's favorite part. One for her, one for the cookie, one for her, one for the cookie...


My kids and I had a lot of fun making these cookies and in the end we all enjoyed eating them too.

Do you make Gingerbread cookies at this time of year? What do you use to decorate them?


If you would like to receive FREE updates of FBS, there are four ways to do so:

• through your RSS Feed
• have updates sent to your email,
• become a fan and 'like' FBS on Facebook
• become a Twitter follower

This post is linked to:

• Tasty Tuesday at Balancing Beauty and Bedlam
• Frugal Friday at Life as MOM