5 Festive Gingerbread Hacks

1 – Making Gingerbread Reindeer

It always seems like a good idea to make shaped gingerbread until you realise how difficult it is to get the cutters. Fortunately, to make a gingerbread reindeer, all you need is a standard gingerbread man cutter! Simply turn the cookie 180°s, or upside down, and you can make the reindeer's nose from the head, the arms become the reindeer's ears, and the legs make perfectly antlers!

Gingerbread reindeer are surprisingly easy to make! Flickr user Crumbs & Corkscrews has added a small notch into each leg to make them look more like antlers!

2 – Spice it up

Whilst ginger is undeniably a major ingredient in gingerbread (surprisingly), using other spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon will add an extra dimension to the flavour of your biscuits and make them so much tastier, and the cinnamon will help to make them even more festive!

3 – Use stiff icing for construction

If you’re putting together a gingerbread house as part of your festivities, make sure you use the right icing! The construction requires firm, stiff icing, in order to hold your panels together, but decoration needs a thinner icing to give you a glossy consistency.

This gingerbread house made by flickr users Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar uses a lot of stiff icing so that everything they've stuck to it stays where it should!

4 – Chill out

Put your gingerbread in the fridge for 10 minutes once you’re rolled out your dough. This will allow it to become firmer, ensuring that you get a cleaner cut and don’t see your cookies shrink up as much.

5 – Freeze that dough!

Gingerbread dough can be frozen for up to three months. Make a large batch of gingerbread dough before the holidays, while you’ve got time on your hands, and dig it out of the freezer when you need another batch of cookies!