Gingerbread House Stand Up Sugar Cookies

Today has been filled with a whole bunch of christmasy activities, I spent a good deal of my morning enjoying wrapping gifts, finally got to finishing writing my Christmas cards this afternoon and I made these cookies.

Two years ago I made my first stand up cookies, pumpkins for Halloween, I was really pleased with how they turned out and I'm surprised at myself that its taken me this long to use the idea again. I realize gingerbread isn't for everyone, so made some cookies that have the cute gingerbread house look but with a yummy vanilla sugar cookie taste.

I think my favourite thing about these cookies is their size, they are a perfect single serving. Being little and not as time consuming as making a proper gingerbread house means I get to gift them to everyone this Christmas.

To make the Gingerbread House Sugar Cookies- prepare your favourite sugar cookie dough (Sugarbelle has a great recipe for sugar cookies and royal icing, plus great tips) and cut out an even number of houses and squares as well as half that amount of each gingerbread men and Christmas trees using mini cutters. 

Bake the cookies according to your recipe and allow to totally cool. While your cookies are cooling prepare and colour royal icing. You will need a thicker icing (for outlining)  and a thinner icing (for flooding) in each of the colours, brown, red,white and green.

Outline a square onto each of the base cookies and place aside to set.

Outline the snowy roof tops with white icing and allow to set. Once the outline is set fill with thinner white icing.

Follow the same steps again for the house and chimney, outline, set and fill with brown icing.

Set the cookies aside to dry.

While the houses are setting ice the gingerbread men and Christmas trees. For the little cookies I didn't use an outline first, instead just used thinner icing piped to make the shapes.

Once the green and brown icings are set, pipe on the little details. Using a fine tipped squeezy bottle pipe the white squiggles on the gingerbread men and the snow onto the pine trees.

Pipe some red dots onto the gingerbread men for buttons and more onto the trees as decorations.

Draw faces onto the gingerbread men with an edible pen.

Outline and fill the little doors on the houses and allow to set. 

Lastly add some details to the door in red and pipe on some little white heart windows.

To assemble the cookies position a wire rack over a container or something else that will hold it at a suitable height to lean the houses and gingerbread men or trees against.

Flood the square cookies with white icing and place under the wire rack. While the icing is still wet stand the cookie house and tree or gingerbread person into position, using the rack as support.

Finish off with a generous coat of white sprinkles. Allow the icing to set completely before carefully removing the support rack and gentle brushing off excess sprinkles.

Enjoy!