Just the smell of gingerbread around the house at Christmas time is enough to get you feeling festive. That’s why I thought I’d make some tasty, bite-sized gingerbread Christmas tree snacks!

You can make these using any cookie cutter shapes you have at home. Even if they’re just the plain circular cutters, you can just ice a Christmassy design on top. Excuse my flood and line icing decorating skills – I’m still honing these…

I’ve put the recipe for my icing below the gingerbread recipe. Maybe your designs will look a bit more professional than mine, it won’t be hard.

Before you start, check that you have enough baking paper to roll your dough between – all those recipes where they say kneed on a floured surface are just so useless. My dough always sticks to my rolling pin and the surface. When you’re baking you want it to be a pleasant, anger-free experience. Rolling the dough between two sheets of floured baking paper is going to give you this experience I promise.

It’s also a good idea to have some resealable sandwich bags to hand. I use one when I chilled my dough and also a few for piping my icing. If you’d rather use a proper icing bag – feel free.

So the extra bits and bobs I used and found useful were:

• baking paper
• resealable sandwich bags
• toothpicks for the icing

Ingredients

For the biscuits:

• 300g gluten-free plain flour (and extra for flouring your baking paper surface)
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 125g butter
• 1 egg
• Pinch of salt
• 64g brown sugar
• 64g golden syrup

For the icing:

• 500g icing sugar
• 15g egg white powder
• 90ml water
• Whatever food colouring your decoration needs. I used green and red – and the natural white.

Method – Making the cookies

1. Cream together your butter and brown sugar
2. Add your syrup and the egg and beat together
3. In a separate bowl mix together the bicarb, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and the flour
4. Add the flour mix to your earlier mix
5. Turn one of your resealable sandwich bags inside out, and scoop up the dough mixture. Turning the bag the right way around. Cool your mixture in the freezer for 15-20 mins
6. Cut your two pieces of baking paper. Lying on down on the worktop, flour on top of it and remove your dough from the freezer. It should be holding together a little better than before
7. Roll your dough gently (we all know how fragile gluten-free dough is) between the two sheets of paper
8. When you’ve rolled it about as thin as a pound coin, gently peel off the top layer of baking paper. Don’t panic if it tears – we can fix it later
9. Flour your cookie cutter’s edges and start gently pressing your shapes into the dough. As you can see I got 6 out of my first roll. But I rolled another 6 from my leftover dough
10. Gently, again, you can never be too gentle. Peel away the ‘trimmings’ of dough surrounding your cookie shapes
11. Now your cookies are free from the surrounding dough, simply slide onto a baking tray – I know right, no torn cookies! WINNER
12. Bake on gas mark 3 for 15 mins, until golden. Slide the baking sheet off your tray and simply replace with your next batch
13. Wait for your cookies to cool on the paper before moving them to a wire rack
14. You can eat now or continue below to decorate them!

Method – making the icing

1. Add your egg white powder to your water and mix. I just did this in a bowl, not a jug
2. Slowly add your icing sugar and mix with a spoon/spatula
3. Keep mixing for about 5 minutes until it’s quite thick
4. Once you’ve mixed it all in you need to separate the icing into however many bowls you need for your different colours
5. For the lining icing (the one you draw around the outside, in my case it was green) you can keep it the same consistency as it is. You need it quite thick to be able to hold your flood icing.
6. Once you’ve separated your icing into the bowls, add small drops of food colouring into the correct mixtures. Only add a bit at a time until you achieve the desired colours
7. To make your icing into flood icing, simply add a little more water, this with make it runnier and easier to cover the inside of your cookie design
8. I had two bags of sandwich bags of green icing (one thinned with water, one without), one red bag of icing and one naturally white bag of icing
9. When you’re ready to ice (and the cookies have cooled completely), cut a tiny corner of the sandwich bag off. Start piping a thin line around your cookie. Make sure there are no breaks in this line, otherwise, the thinner flood icing will just trickle out
10. After you’ve piped around all cookies, go back to the one you first started with and flood your design with the desired colour. Continue with your design
11. Leave your cookie designs to dry
12. Eat and enjoy!

If you have any questions – don’t hesitate to contact me at Nell[at]glutenousminimus.co.uk!