Well, our Herdy Christmas cookies recipe proved so popular that we are back baking again! If baking’s not really your thing but you’re super into crafts, don’t forget we also have a Herdy felt gift bag tutorial, complete with a free template. For today’s baking we are making some iced Herdy Christmas gingerbread decorations that you can use as Christmas tree ornaments.
Let’s begin!
This recipe makes about 17 gingerbread Herdys.
First, melt the butter, sugar, and syrup in a pan using a low heat. Whilst they’re melting, mix the gingerbread dry ingredients in a bowl until homogenous then add the melted butter/sugar/syrup and mix together well until it forms a ball of dough. Roll out the dough on a floured surface to 7mm thick and use the Herdy Yan Cookie Cutter to cut out the Herdy biscuit shapes. If you want to hang these on your Christmas tree, be sure to include a hole near the top of each Herdy’s head. Place on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper and bake the biscuits for 14 minutes at 160°C/320°F.
1. Whilst they’re baking, mix up a batch of royal icing with the colours you desire. To do this, whisk the egg whites until meringue-like, then stir in the lemon juice and gradually stir in the sieved icing sugar until smooth. Add colouring of your choice. We made Herdy green, blue, pink, orange, white, and purple, alongside black that you will need to make the facial features. Put the different coloured icing into piping bags, ready to decorate.
2. Once the Herdy gingerbreads have baked and cooled down, pipe a thin coloured outline around the Herdy body and allow to harden.
3. Flood the body shape with coloured icing to create the “jumper” shape.
4. With a contrasting coloured royal icing, pipe lines across the jumper, then drag the tip of a cocktail stick through the lines downwards to create a pattern. You can also add piped shapes or dots for detail. We used tiny silver balls, snowflakes, holly leaves, and berries for detail on our decorations.
5. Using coloured icing, create some little boots as shown and add detail if desired.
6. Using a piping bag with a very fine nozzle, pipe some black icing to create the eyes and nose/mouth of your Herdy biscuits.
BONUS: you can also get some colour-matching ribbon for hanging the Herdy gingerbreads on your Christmas tree! Just pull a length of colour-matching ribbon through the hole at the top of the Herdy gingerbread (ensuring you have enough to hang onto your tree), cut off the excess, and tie in a knot.
