Gingerbread Place Cards – Whimsical Table Decoration
Gingerbread Place Cards – Whimsical Table Decoration
Last New Year’s Day I was thinking about place cards for our lunch celebration and wanted something more interesting than the regular folded gold cards I had in my crafts cabinet.
I remembered the Gingerbread House I baked last year so I created little gingerbread boys and girls and embellished them with colored sugar crystals and icing. The fun part is decorating them with the colored sugar, candies and nonpareils so they resembled each of the guests.
To start, find your favorite Gingerbread house recipe ( I used gluten-free) and royal icing ( is the “glue” for the cookie person to stick to the base and for the sugar and decorations to dry on to the cookie). If you need a good base recipe, here is a good link:
http://www.marthastewart.com/272117/gingerbread-house-recipes
Roll out the dough and use your favorite gingerbread man cookie cutter to cut out the shapes. Make sure to cut out square or round bases about 1/2″ wider than the cookie and bake until crisp ( use directions on your recipe) on a baking sheet. Remove to cooling rack. Make the Royal icing and put some in an icing bag or squeeze bottle for cake decorating with a small tip.
Once cookies are cool, use a dollop of icing on the base and position the cookie upright. You will need to lean it against something until it sets, about 30 minutes. When cookies are all set and it is time to decorate them, assemble all your decorating sugars and candies and place the cookies on a wire rack over a tray ( to catch the run off of the sugar and decorations).
Then start piping hair, clothes , eyes and any designs you want on the mini people cookies. I usually start with the hair, sprinkling the colored sugar on that, tapping off the excess into the tray below and letting it set slightly before moving on to another part. Repeat doing sections and letting them harden with their decorations so the different colors don’t blend together. Have fun with being creative, try shaved chocolate curls for hair,
sliced gumdrops for shoes, shiny edible metallic balls for eyes and jewelry. If you have a color scheme for your table, it would also be fun to use all those colors.
If you have extra cookie dough, use your other cutouts and make some fun regular cookies with decoration.
Happy Holidays!
SUBLIME DELIGHTS 
hey! you’ve done it again! I love it — also my mouth is watering…….like crazy.
More than one with red hair, I see!