Gingerbread Cookie Tree

You know Christmas is coming when you start planning gingerbread structures, I will be making a house of course but first I thought I'd try something different - a cookie tree!

I've seen a lot of these over the last couple of years and have been dying to make one so was super excited to see a set in The Works for only £2.99, a set made up of a set of star cutters, hole cutter and two different height stands depending on how tall you want it.

Using the recipe below we made up about 4-8 of each size of star to get it as tall as possible, cutting a hole in each one before baking. Once baked I set them aside for icing, I made up a huge batch of green royal icing for piping and filled a huge icing bag up.

I iced each star with green, stacking more on top and it soon filled up the biggest stand. I kept aside a star for the top and painted it with gold edible paint and dusted it in cake glitter. For tree decorations I added sugar snowflakes, purple coated chocolates, mini candy canes and even more red and gold glitter...you can never really have enough anyway!

I have to say I was surprisingly pleased with how it turned out as I wasn't really sure what I was going to be doing with in on the decoration side, I seem to do my best stuff when winging it. We had a little bake off at work for Christmas and it fitted very nicely into the festive theme...keep posted for the gingerbread house I'm decorating tomorrow!

Gingerbread Recipe:


250g butter
125 golden syrup
150ml double cream
250g icing sugar
400g plain flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground gloves
1/2 tsp pepper

You need to add more spices to taste.

Heat butter, golden syrup, double cream and icing sugar in a saucepan. Leave the mixture to cool and stir in the rest of the ingredients. Knead the dough well and roll out, cut out star shaped pieces, make the holes and bake on 175 degrees (165 fan) for 10-12 min. Pin It Now!