Directions

• 1.

  Bake and cool cookies before decorating. Try Ann Clark's classic gingerbread cookie recipe. Make sure cookies are fully cooled. If they are warm, the icing will run off of them. Make royal icing.

• 2.

  Prepare the following icing colors:
  
  Detail Consistency:
  White

  Red

  Gold (create gold icing by mixing a tiny amount of mocha brown food coloring into your lemon yellow royal icing)

  Flood Consistency:
  White

  Red

  Thick Flood Consistency:
  Black

• 3.

  Begin by mapping out the details with your edible marker. You can freehand this design, but we find it easier to draw out the details before icing when designs are a bit more complex.

• 4.

  Use your white detail consistency icing to outline the jacket details on your cookie. These are the white fur parts on Santa's coat--the hemline and arm cuffs. Be sure to outline a space for the beard, which will lay over the jacket.

• 5.

  Make Santa's belt by outlining and filling in a thick black line at the waist of your cookie using black thick flood icing.

• 6.

  Finish outlining the jacket using red detail consistency icing.

• 7.

  Flood the jacket with red flood consistency icing. Be sure not to flood the white cuffs or the space you left for Santa's beard.

• 8.

  Use red detail consistency icing to make Santa's cap in the upper left side of his head.

• 9.

  Use white detail consistency icing to outline Santa's mustache. Also use the white detail consistency icing to fill in the cuffs and hemline of the jacket, the rim of Santa's hat, and Santa's beard and mustache. Detail consistency icing, rather than flood consistency, will add nice texture to these areas.

• 10.

  Use black thick flood icing to add eyes and a nose, and white detail consistency to add bushy eyebrows.

• 11.

  Use black thick flood icing to outline and fill in Santa's boots.

• 12.

  The last touch to finish this Santa cookie is a little gold buckle. Outline a gold rectangle with detail consistency icing on the black belt. And you're done!