This holiday season, enjoy a sweet treat with this fun Christmas cookie decorating kit. Cookies by Design sent me this complimentary kit, and if you purchase through any links I earn a commission, but all opinions remain my own.
Buy this complete gingerbread man cookie decorating kit from Cookies by Design.
I love baking cookies – if you can’t tell from all the cookie recipes I have on my site – but I don’t often do decorated cookies. To get the right shape and then multiple colors of frosting takes more time and energy than I often have.
But my kids love to decorate cookies. I usually indulge them every two or three years. However, the Christmas cookie decorating kit from Cookies by Design may change everything in my house.
Earlier this fall, we played with the Halloween cookie decorating kit, and we had a ball. We learned some tips to make the decorating go more smoothly, and our Christmas cookie decorating turned out even better.
As with the Halloween cookies, these cookies taste amazing. The cinnamon brown sugar gingerbread men taste really good without being too spicy for kids to enjoy, and the frosting is equally delicious.
Yes, my daughter did in fact save all the extra icing and eat it straight from the bag for dessert. Most of it, anyway.
The Christmas cookie decorating kit comes with 10 gingerbread men and three colors of icing, which makes it a perfect party activity or treat. Or enjoy it as a new family tradition and spend an afternoon or evening decorating your cookies.
And FYI Cookies by Design has introduced a Thanksgiving cookie decorating kit with pies, pumpkins, and turkeys. Just sayin’.
Reasons to buy this Christmas cookie decorating kit
They taste great.
I mentioned this already, but really good tasting cookies deserve another mention. Often the pretty cookies you find don’t taste good, but Cookies by Design combines flavor with looks!
They make a fantastic gift.
Do you have friends or family you can’t be with this year? Send them a cookie decorating kit as a surprise.
They will love the fun activity, and yes, Cookies by Design delivers pretty much anywhere. If there isn’t a store near them that can “hand deliver” the cookies, FedEx steps in to take over.
Get a kit for yourself, too, and you can decorate your cookies together via a virtual party and show each other the cookies as you decorate it. This makes a fun and fantastic way to connect across distance.
We all need a little less stress in our lives.
Right now, baking pretty Christmas cookies like this isn’t on my priority list. To make the dough, then chill it, then roll it out and cut it, bake it, etc. And then make multiple different colors of frosting and put each one in a piping bag?
No thank you. Inevitably, my cookies break. Or they don’t bake right and don’t look like the shape they started out as when I put them in the oven.
Or I make my frosting too thick or too thin. Nope, I will happily hand over the responsibility to Cookies by Design to create the perfect cookie kit for me instead.
There’s no wrong way to decorate the gingerbread men.
That’s half the fun, right? Decorate them any which way you want. My daughter had fun making a “pirate” gingerbread man with one of her cookies, and I think it turned out pretty cool.
At the same time, the cookies are shaped so that you can turn them into gingerbread ladies if you prefer. We ended up with both gingerbread men and women in our final group.
And if instead you want to simply pile on as much frosting as you can fit on the cookie, go for it. It just tastes better, right? This makes it the perfect activity for all ages, regardless of artistic ability.
The cookie decorating kit has plenty of everything you need.
When the kit arrives, it comes on a sturdy plastic platter – that I have saved to use for future entertaining needs – with the cookies and icing sealed inside.
The three icing bags are large and contain more icing than you will need for your 10 cookies, and that makes life much easier.
Whether you decide to portion out your icing into additional piping bags so no one has to share (thankfully not an issue in my house!) or someone chooses to coat each cookie in, say, red and only red, there is still plenty of icing left for everyone else.
Anything that reduces arguments over the holiday season is a win in my book.
The cookies stay fresh when sealed.
You can choose to have your cookies delivered when you want – just make sure to order them in advance, as they don’t have them prepped and ready to go in stores and make them fresh for you! However, you may choose to have them delivered on a specific day and then life happens.
That may or may not have happened to us.
In fact, our cookies stayed in their beautiful wrapping sealed for almost a week before we finally managed to have everyone’s schedules coincide to decorate. The cookies – when sealed – stayed fresh and soft, as did the icing.
Even when the chaos of the holidays intervenes, you can still enjoy your cookies. It definitely helps that they are baked fresh just before they get delivered, too!
Pro Decorating Tips
I shared some of our tips when we decorated our Halloween cookies, but we improved further with this Christmas cookie decorating kit.
General tips:
Have everyone set up their own work area. I made sure our table was appropriately covered and also gave each person a small plate to work on.
When you cut off the end of the piping bag, cut just a tiny bit from the end. It doesn’t take much to make a hole large enough to pipe out the frosting. And once your hole is too big….
Get creative with your decorating. But if you need hints, look at the Cookies by Design cookie kit page where they show what they did with the Christmas cookies.
Use a knife
We didn’t do this with our first go around, but I got out several butter knives to use when we decorated our gingerbread men. The knives let us smooth the frosting on the cookies, which gave a more finished look to them.
The frosting in this cookie decorating kit isn’t a true royal icing, and it’s thicker than many cookie decorating icings. That’s good because it’s easier to control (and remove if you make a boo boo), but it also doesn’t smooth automatically into a nice finish.
Use a knife to smooth it, gently like you’re frosting a cake not like you’re buttering bread.
Swirl your colors
This is another idea we didn’t have for our Halloween cookies, but red and white make a fantastic pink, for example. If you add your colors to the cookie and then carefully swirl them with your knife, you can take the three colors you receive and turn them into far more.
The same holds true for color gradation. Add some white to the green frosting, and you can have various shades of green to add even more artistic emphasis to your cookie creation.
Learn how to hold your icing bag properly
Place the rubber banded part of the bag in the webbing between your thumb and index finger, and close your hand around that. Squeeze from there, and use your second hand closer to the tip to provide direction.
Just. Don’t. Squeeze. There. It’s tempting to squeeze from the open end, but you end up with two problems.
If you do it enough, the icing will pop out the top of the bag. My husband did this when we made our Halloween cookies, and oops. (That said, we still had plenty of icing.)
Even if you just do it a little, you don’t have consistent pressure pushing out the icing, and you end up with different line thicknesses or even spurts of air where your line disconnects completely. While this isn’t a disaster by any stretch, it can frustrate those who want to make the “perfect” cookie.
If you make a mistake, start over
Because this frosting is thicker and not a royal icing, a mistake in your cookie doesn’t have to remain a mistake. If it’s just a small error, you can often carefully use a finger to pinch off the accident and leave no trace of it.
If you decide you don’t like how your cookie turned out, you can carefully use that knife to lift off your entire decoration and start over. Because – repeat after me – there is plenty of icing.
This is perfect for smaller kids who may have one thing in mind but not yet the fine motor skills to achieve what they really want to create. Instead of a melt down, just start over!
Don’t forget to order your own gingerbread cookie decorating kit – whether for yourself or as a gift!
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