Help me make gingerbread friends!
December 9, 2009 9:03 AM   Subscribe

Calling all bakers: I need much help! I have convinced myself to pursue what may be a too-ambitious project for the holidays, that is, baking gingerbread men and women decorated to look like my friends. I do not bake.

HOWEVER, I am quite crafty and creative otherwise. (This is a surprise so I am on my own.) I am hoping to make about 20 cookies (one per friend), slip them in little plastic baggies and give them out as gifts. I have many questions that google offers too many answers to:

1) What is the yummiest gingerbread cookie recipe you have ever baked/tasted that would still be able to hold a gingerbread person form? Taste is important - I have had really cool looking cookies from the bakery that taste like sawdust.

2) Where can I get affordable cookie cutters/decoration supplies in New York? What size should I get that would make the gingerbread people large enough to decorate with detail but not too large that I end up having to bake tons and tons of dough?

3) What do I use to decorate them that wouldn't be too hard to do? Ideally they would end up looking more like this: http://www.coppergifts.com/productcart/pc/catalog/cg1-3166_2_300.jpg rather than this: http://www.coppergifts.com/productcart/pc/catalog/cg1-4744_1_300.jpg

4) How much earlier can I bake these cookies before giving them out without them tasting stale?

5) Any process tips? I imagine I will do all the baking first so I end up with a bunch of naked gingerbread people and THEn proceed about taking my time in decorating.

6) What essential supplies do I need to buy? I do not bake so I pretty much have nothing. So far, I am planning to borrow a folding table for space, pick up a rolling pin, borrow a mixer..

I am committing next weekend for this project and hoping to procure everything I need by then. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!
posted by pinksoftsoap to Food & Drink (15 answers total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
It sounds like you might need some guidance when you do go to a kitchen supply store, so I would recommend Broadway Panhandler near the corner of 8th street and Broadway (RW 8th street/NYU stop). I've had pretty good service there.

A mistake I made a lot and it seems like common sense, but that be damned - make sure you let the cookies cool fully before you decorate them. I made a lot of messed up layer cakes because I was SO EXCITED to frost them. Big mistake.
posted by spec80 at 9:24 AM on December 9, 2009


It's not as easy as you might think to decorate with frosting. Another option is to make sugar cookies and use cookie paint (which you make, not buy) to decorate them. This will also require less in the way of new supplies. (If you're interested, I will post the recipes that I use for sugar cookies with paint. With those you need only food colouring in the colours you want, brushes to paint with, and the normal accoutrements to make cookies.)

Yes, make all the cookies at once. Have some extras to practice on. You'll also want to draw out your designs before you make them.
posted by jeather at 9:27 AM on December 9, 2009 [2 favorites]


Best answer: This is a tasty cookie recipe.

It sounds like you need to find a store that stocks Wilton brand stuff. I normally kind of hate Wilton, (they're BigCake, and dominate consumer/hobby baking products) but they have everything you need. They've got thick icing in tubes that look like school glue. This is what you want. This isn't like cake icing, it'll dry hard and shiny. Of course you can make your own royal icing, but then you've got to dye each batch, getting bags for each batch, changing tips, etc.

The general technique you're going to want to do, is think of your design as solid color separated by lines. Make these lines first, then flood the remaining area with thinned colored icing. I'd even start sketching your people on paper now, as I think that will be the most difficult part.

A similar project

Note, that if you want to do any layers on top of the color, you'll have to let them dry overnight.

You will have terrible hand cramps by the end of this.
posted by fontophilic at 9:28 AM on December 9, 2009 [1 favorite]


Best answer: You'll need the whole weekend. I'd bake the cookies during the week, spend Saturday on the outlining and filling, and Sunday on the details.

You will be making loads of icing - for each color you will need stiff icing to do the outlining and then a thinner version to fill it. Like fontophilic said, you basically outline the different areas with thick icing in your color of choice, let that set up a bit, then thin the icing and "flood" the outlined areas. So, the fewer colors you use the simpler this will be.

Likewise, if you can do all the detail work (faces, outlining, etc) in white, your Sunday will go much faster than if you have to deal with multiple pastry bags and either switching out tips or buying several of the basic outlining tip.

Detailed icing work takes a very steady hand and constant pressure. Practice on wax or parchment paper, that way you can scrape up the icing and reuse it.

Good luck!
posted by Flannery Culp at 9:57 AM on December 9, 2009


jeather, please post the cookie & paint recipe.
posted by not that girl at 9:58 AM on December 9, 2009


Best answer: Agreed, you should draw out how you want them to look, ahead of time. If you can't sketch it out on paper, it won't look any better on the cookie.

About cutting: Look at cookie cutters and see what you can find. When I imagine your people, I think of them being 7" tall or so. If you can't find a cutter you like, it's perfectly fine to cut a template out of cardboard (my mom always used the back cover of a notebook) and just cut around it with a butter knife.

About rolling out: I highly recommend a pastry cloth and rolling-pin cover. You'll have to saturate it with flour, but once you get going, you don't have as much of a flour-coating over everything. Also much easier to get the cut shape from the rolling surface to the pan without it changing shape, since you can lift the cloth. Try rolling out just one at a time until you get used to the process of moving hte little dough shapes around. When you first get started, try out a couple of different thicknesses; I'd aim for 3/16" or so, maybe up to 1/4", but 1/8" is likely to be too delicate.

About baking: You'll want several cookie sheets, and don't try to pack too many per sheet (maybe 2-3). The cookies will spread out as they bake. There are different "looks" for different thicknesses of dough, different dough consistencies, etc, and I've found (opinion) that the recipes that spread least tend to be the cardboardy-tasting ones. If your recipe/cutter/oven/rolling combination comes out looking blobby, it's actually very easy to fine-tune - as soon as you pull it out of the oven, while it's still hot, set your cutter back on top of the cookie and trim the spread area off. To avoid sticking, consider lining your baking pans with (in order of preference) parchment paper, aluminum foil (spray-greased), or wax paper (spray-greased); it's usually pretty easy to peel the paper backing off a cooled cookie than to lift a large cookie off a baking sheet (if you try it without a liner, be sure to use a really thin spatula to lift).

So now, you've got beautiful cooled cookies. Put them in a tupperware or on a baking sheet under saran, clean up the kitchen and go to bed. Decorate later. Decorated or no, the cookies will keep for 2 weeks or so. Consider getting little clear plastic "treat-bags" with twist ties, from the candy-making section of a craft store, as you'll want to package these in an air-tight nice-looking way.

For decorating, you've got several options, well-described already. If you start doing lines with a frosting bag, it's not super-difficult but does take some practice. Photocopy your paper sketches, and try frosting the paper as a trial run. One other technique my mom often used for detail work was to just smooth-frost the whole cookie white, and let it set, then take a paint-brush (regular art/craft brush, but clean) and a set of food-coloring, and just paint the design she wanted. If you feel your art-fu failing you, talk to a local bakery about printing out those photo-gel sheets that they lay over the tops of cakes, which you could get with any design that you can make a jpeg of.
posted by aimedwander at 10:25 AM on December 9, 2009


I did this recently. Only, umm, with roleplaying characters instead of my friends. Ahem. My experiences:

I didnt like gingerbread, in the end, i used a german biscuit recipe from my mum instead that also doesnt expand much. However, you may have better luck finding a gingerbread recipe you like.

I also planned all the designs exactly in advance - drew them to scale on paper, with simple lines and shapes. And then i cut around the paper to make the biscuits, and had a guide to follow exactly to ice them

Icing bags are good. But so are those icing tubes you get in supermarkets. They come in all boxes with different colours and are hugely convenient. I used a mix of own icing + icing bags for large areas of colour, and the bought tubes for the details. It really cut down on the time spent mixing different coloured icing.

Also, from my scant knowledge, there are two kinds general kinds of gingerbread - those made to be eaten quickly, and those made to last forever but which dont taste as good. If taste is more important, i assume you want the former.
posted by stillnocturnal at 10:58 AM on December 9, 2009


Response by poster: Thanks for the replies so far! yes Jeather, please post the sugar cookie recipe. I am thinking now that perhaps I should find a simpler, potentially tastier cookie recipe instead of limiting myself to gingerbread.
posted by pinksoftsoap at 11:06 AM on December 9, 2009


I vote for sticking with gingerbread dough. Cookies made with it stay fresh a long time so friends can enjoy looking at the cookies for a while before eating them.

If mixing your own colors, you'll want good food dyes, not the little droppers commonly found in grocery stores; you won't get the color intensity you want with the droppers, and the red tastes bad. Wilton makes variety boxes of paste dyes.

How thin you'll need to roll your dough really depends on the recipe - too thin and they'll be fragile, too thick and they'll be floppy. Do a few test cookies and see how they are after cooling.

I don't think the icing tubes in supermarkets are royal icing, which is what you need. Anything else won't dry hard enough to survive being bagged. As fontophiliac says, you can get this pre-made from Wilton too. If you make your own (which isn't hard), consider using meringue powder (also in the Wilton aisle at JoAnn, Hobby Lobby, Michael's, or whatever craft store you have around) instead of raw egg whites, just in case.

To avoid having to lift up the gingerbread person shapes once you've rolled and cut them, with most recipes you can roll right onto parchment paper, cut your shapes (leaving a little room between), and remove the excess dough, then slide the whole thing onto a cookie sheet. The parchment will want to slide around on your countertop, but try tearing off a long-ish sheet and anchoring it with your hip while you roll away from yourself, then spin the thing around and roll the other way. This way you can also slide them off the pan to cool without risking breaking them with a spatula.
posted by lakeroon at 11:56 AM on December 9, 2009


I'm voting for sugar cookies over gingerbread.

Gingerbread = Meh

Sugar Cookies = YES PLEASE!

One thing to remember when you are making sugar cookies is that the dough needs to chill for at least an hour. I usually make the dough the night before I want to roll it out. Make a ton and leave it in the fridge, just take out a little at a time. I also vote for doing all the baking on one day and decorate on a different day.

After they come out of the oven, leave them on the cookie sheet too cool for a few minutes. This will allow them to firm up a little. Then move them to a wire rack to cool completely.

You might need to make a few batches to get the cook time right. In my oven I have to turn the pan around half way through the bake time to get them to cook evenly. YMMV, so plan extras. It is always better to have too many cookies!
posted by TooFewShoes at 12:18 PM on December 9, 2009


When I bake decorated cookies with my kids, we use the Pillsbury sugar cookie dough that comes in tubes in the refrigerator case at the grocery store. Use the same suggestions for rolling it out as everyone above has said. I think they might have a tube of gingerbread flavor during the holidays.

I was also going to suggest that you contact a bakery and just buy some of their naked gingerbread men. Your gift can be the cool decorations; you don't have to make the cookies yourself.
posted by CathyG at 12:45 PM on December 9, 2009


The sugar cookie recipe I have used:

1/2 cup butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup sugar
2 beaten eggs
1 tbsp milk
2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking pwder

Beat sugar, vanilla and butter until fluffy. Combine eggs and milk, and mix into butter mixture. Add dry ingredients last. Refrigerate 1 hour. Roll out and cut into shapes. Bake at 400 for 6-8 minutes. Four dozen per batch.

Note: four dozen smallish cookies, not large ones.

Cookie paint:

To 1 egg yolk,add 1/4 to 1/2 tsp water. Divide in 1/2 for each colour.

Paint the cookie before you bake it. Paint some test cookies and bake them first. You will want to bake less rather than more so the egg yolk doesn't get too dark. If you want to outline, it's best to buy an icing pen and do that after they are baked.

For food colouring, use the nice pots of it and buy the colours you want, as much as possible: they don't mix quite the same as paints do.

I used to give these as gifts regularly, and they are very popular. These are a fairly crisp cookie, though you can roll them less thin for a chewier one.
posted by jeather at 12:49 PM on December 9, 2009 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I just saw this royal icing tutorial today, and you might appreciate today's post from Bakerella.
posted by runningwithscissors at 1:29 PM on December 9, 2009


No one cares if they're stale; they get put on the mantel and admired, so make a stiff dough that will take some abuse. Keep It Simple. 2 cutters, Boy, Girl. Choose 1 or 2 features to add for each person. Do the feature in color and everything else in white. Jane's yellow blonde hair and plaid skirt, Jake's brown beard and bow tie. Every cookie gets a cinnamon candy heart. Make a lot of extra cookies; they break.
posted by theora55 at 8:06 PM on December 9, 2009


Best answer: I imagine the simplest way to decorate the cookies would be with royal icing, tinted with food coloring, and applied with a pastry bag with a small tip.

You must, must, must, go to the baking store on 22nd Street. They would have the cookie cutters you need (I've never seen so many cookie cutters in one place!) as well as things like pastry bags, adapters and tips, food coloring, and they probably have pre-made royal icing (if not, it's simple to make). They'll also have things like dragees (those odd little silver balls) in various shapes, colored sugar, sprinkles, and a really intriguing substance called pearl dust.

I prefer the pastry bags made out of muslin coated on the inside with some kind of plastic. I also prefer French rolling pins. They look like a tapered dowel, and cost around $12, but are easier to use than the kind with handles. The cake store has them, as does Zabar's.

Good luck! It sounds like a really fun project.
posted by Lycaste at 1:38 PM on December 10, 2009


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