Novel Bakery

I adore Molly Idle and especially the Tea Rex series that follow Cordelia and her little brother George (I know his name because I asked Molly Idle!) and their dinosaur friends on adventures. For Santa Rex, I had to recreate the gingerbread cookies the kids make for Santa, along with my favorite gingerbread recipe.

Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
paper chains,
strings of popcorn,
and cut-out window snowflakes.
Everyone loves to help bake Christmas cookies.
So delicious, they’re sure to disappear quickly.
Be sure to save a few for Santa…

Santa Rex by Molly Idle

I love a soft, chewy, spicy gingerbread cookie. Every year, I make a giant batch to share with friends. Typically, my gingerbread cookies are decorated simply with a white royal icing. But this year, I finally made time to color the frosting and do lots of cute decorations.

I’ve tried several different recipes over the years, but this gingerbread recipe from Erin McDowell is excellent. It’s easy to make, the cookies are perfectly spiced, and they’re thick and chewy!

It can be so fun to cut out the cookies with kids. I’ve got a few different sets of cookie cutters at this point, but this set is a good starting point for Christmas!

After baking and cooling, I love decorating cookies with royal icing. I know, the recipe I use has raw egg. I use the carton of pasteurized egg whites. And if you aren’t comfortable with raw eggs, there are lots of recipes that use meringue powder. In my experience, it never tastes quite as good so I use the egg whites.

For coloring the icing, I learned an awesome trick when taking a cookie decorating class. To keep a color palette consistent, mix as many colors as possible in the same bowl. For instance, mix your pink, add your pink to the piping bag, then in that same bowl with traces of pink icing still in the bowl, mix your red. An orange could be mixed in that same bowl. Greens and blues could get mixed in the same bowl. Browns could be mixed in any of the colors. You get the picture.

While I used my regular Wilton piping bags for these cookies, next time I want to try these piping bags to see if I can get a better cut on the tip.

It was so much fun recreating the cookies from the book.

I, of course, also had to make some pink Christmas trees for GUP with the left-over pink icing and Christmas tree cookies.

What do you bake every year for the holidays?