Snowflake Gingerbread Ornaments

To start this post, I want to add a formal apology to my follows, for saying that I was going to post this darling baby shower that I had the opportunity to do.  I have been extremely lucky this season, to have had past and new clients hire me for some Interior Design, and decorating their homes for the Holidays that I have not had the time to work on blogging at all.  I could throw them up this week, but I wouldnt have time to do tutorials or recipes and I prefer doing it all together.  So I wont be posting the baby shower until January.  But I promise it will be worth the wait, since I have two beautiful baby showers to show, with tutorials and original recipes.  In the mean time, I promise to be a much better blogger and will be posting at least twice a week, if not more!  I have the most amazing recipes, Christmas Decor, How Tos and so on for December so stay tuned!

Ten years ago, my Mother told me about one of the most beautiful trees that she had ever seen was this tree made of all natural elements, and gingerbread cookies.  So I have wanted to re-create this tree for years, but I just havn't had the house to do it in.  This year, I decided to try making gingerbread ornaments, and make my tree a low budget tree, using candy, homemade ornaments, balls, and twigs.  To start off my Christmas blog, im going to show you the step by step on how I created my tree, and tips on how to create your own.

The first step was making the Gingerbread Ornaments.  Most recipes that I read are made with apple sauce, cinnamon, and salt.  They take 4 days to set up and apparently smell better, but I wanted to make true gingerbread cookies, with Molasses and lots of spices.  So I found this recipe off Food Network, that looked good and used it.  The only tweeks that I made, was I added 1/4 cup cinnamon, 1 whole nutmeg, ( ground it up so probably 1 teaspoon worth) and 1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice.  Let me tell you, the house smells AMAZING, even with a cold!

All you need is cookie dough, cute snowflake cookie cutters (I used William Sonoma's), Glitter from the craft store, royal icing, piping bag and small round tip, and ribbon.

So here is the recipe:

Ingredients

Gingerbread:

• 8 ounces (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened at room temperature
• 3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 cup dark molasses (not blackstrap)
• 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 3 1/4 cups cake flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Royal Icing:

• 2 cups or more confectioners' sugar
• 3 tablespoons milk
• 1 teaspoon egg white*

Directions

Make the Gingerbread: In a mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugar and mix. Add the eggs and mix. Add the molasses and vanilla and mix.

Sift the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves together. Working in batches and mixing after each addition until just combined, add the dry ingredients to the butter-sugar mixture. Shape the dough into a thick disk, wrap in waxed paper, and refrigerate 1 to 2 hours.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Grease 1 or 2 cookie sheets. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out 1/4-inch thick and cut out with desired cookie cutters.

To make the Royal Icing: In a mixer, blend the confectioners' sugar, milk, and egg white together. Add more sugar to get a pipe-able consistency.

I followed her royal icing recipe but added 1 more cup of powder sugar to get the consistency I was looking for.  Then I used an piping bag and small round tip to pipe out the snowflake designs.  Next while the icing was still wet I used NON EDIBLE glitter and dumped it on top of the frosting and then dumped the excess off. Lastly I let them dry for one day, then tied cute ribbons on them  so that they are ready to hang on the tree.