Video How to Decorate Gingerbread Men | Christmas Cookies

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Hi. I'm Katie Rosenhaus, and today I'm going to talk about how to decorate gingerbread men. So we've already made the dough, and it's been baking for about 12 to 15 minutes. And you can see they come out nice and lightly golden right around the edges. So these cookies are ready to go, except before we put our royal icing on the top we need them to cool thoroughly. So on the side here I have a batch that's already cool, and these are ready to work with. So I'm just going to grab a couple of the nicest-looking cookies. I'll just do a couple here. And I'm going to decorate in two different ways. But again, I'm using royal icing which we talked about earlier, just a combination of powdered sugar, a little meringue powder, and water to get the right consistency.

So to have some fun I'm working with white, green, and let's make a little bit of red. I have my red gel color here and a bowl of white icing. I'm just going to do a nice dollop of red right in there. I'll stir that up. And you can see this gel color, a little bit goes a long way. That's it. Very cute. So we've got our red. We've got our green. We've got our white. And here's where we can have some fun. So let's talk about a really simple way. I could just take my royal icing, white royal icing in a piping bag and just go in and kind of do cute little zig-zags right along his arms. And let's do the other side. And let's do some more right at the bottom. OK. Some eyes. And you can see as I'm piping eyes, I'm not piping kisses. I'm just piping little dots and kind of moving the tip at the end to avoid getting too much of a kiss shape. This one's a little bit like a snowman/gingerbread man. And then use that same icing to just do some buttons going down, and of course you could always use something like candies to finish the work for you. So there's one cute possibility. Let's get into some more colors here. We'll go ahead and do the same face with a nice, big smile. The same buttons going down the center. But let's give him a little more of an outfit this time. So we've got our red. We've got our green. We've got a little more red.

You can always dress this up with any colors that you like. And I'm going to give him some cute little pants here. So I've got my green royal icing in my bag, and I just pipe a border first, and maybe some little suspenders going up. And then you could always take some extra royal icing and just do a little flooding right in the center of the cookie. So you just put a little excess icing and take a paintbrush and just push that out to the edge so we fill the whole bottom. OK. So there we have one more really cute little gingerbread man. Let's do one more. Let's give him a little bit of a different color. So here's where you could take all of your colors, and maybe we'll do the same bottoms here, a nice thin line of green going up. A little interesting design, maybe some zig-zags going up. We'll give him a couple of buttons. Maybe red and green. And then we'll take our red color and just put a little bit in the center.

And totally have fun. You can write your names in this. You could do anything you like. Royal icing is perfect for doing all types of decorations. Swirling colors together, doing different colors. Look how cute he is. He just needs a face. Just a little face. So let's give him one. So we've got our eyes here, our nose, and again a nice big smile. And those are some simple ways with just a couple of tools on how you decorate gingerbread men.