Baking with kids – easy gingerbread crowns

If you live in the UK it can’t have escaped your notice that we have a new addition to the Royal family – Prince Louis. My children have been talking about this so I thought we could bake some simple gingerbread crowns to celebrate the royal birth. With the Royal Wedding coming up next month, as well as the Queen’s birthday, these easy gingerbread crowns are a fun way to get your kids baking whilst also celebrating all the upcoming Royal events.

Baking with kids – easy gingerbread crowns

First I made a batch of gingerbread dough. I used my favourite gingerbread recipe which you can see here. It makes a lot of dough so I separated it into four equal pieces, wrapped them in cling film and stored them in the fridge until we needed them. When we were ready I took two balls out and let them get up to room temperature. All I needed was a crown cookie cutter and a rolling pin.

I rolled out the dough quite thin for this, and cut out my crowns. This is something my children love to help me with, although I have to admit my 6 year old constantly eats the dough.

The crowns were quite large so we only cut out 4 – 2 for each child to decorate. We chilled them in the freezer for 10 minutes to make sure they didn’t spread whilst baking. Then we baked them at 180° for about 8 minutes.

I didn’t want to over bake them so pulled them out and let them cool down for a few minutes before transferring them to a baking tray. They had a lovely golden colour.

We let them cool down completely before we decorated them. We used ready made white icing and Edible Cake Pens (both from Wilko’s). We rolled out the white icing and used the crown cookie cutter to cut out our shapes. These were placed on top of our gingerbread crowns, with a thin layer of jam to stick them in place.

The children took it in turns to decorate their crown shaped cookies. The icing pens worked pretty well and they coloured in jewels and shapes.