Over the weekend I decided to make one of the gingerbread kits I had bought and featured in my Gingerbread Gift Guide. I chose the Waitrose Gingerbread & Shortbread Decorating Kit. The kit helps you bake and decorate your own magical festive treats and included ingredients to make both gingerbread men and shortbread Christmas tree shaped biscuits. I thought these would be great for baking edible gingerbread decorations to hang on our tree.

Baking edible gingerbread decorations

I just needed to add unsalted butter, water and golden syrup to the packet mixes. First I made the shortbread, leaving it to chill in the fridge whilst I mixed up the gingerbread.

Then I made the gingerbread dough, leaving it to  chill in the fridge whilst I cut out the tree and gingerbread man shape templates from the box. A little later I was ready to cut out my dough. I rolled out the shortbread and cut six tree shapes from it. Then I rolled my gingerbread dough and cut out 6 shapes.

The dough was a gorgeous dark colour and smelled amazing! There was enough of the gingerbread left over to cut out some extra circles.

Then I baked them all in the oven according to the instructions on the packet.

The kit included White and Green writing icing pens and a sachet of Red, White and Green 100’s & 1000’s. I used these to decorate the shortbread Christmas tree biscuits because I knew we would eat them straight away. However I just used white icing to decorate the gingerbread men. I also made a small hole in the top of each one so I could thread them with ribbon to hang them. I decorated them quite simply but they looked like classic gingerbread men hung on our tree – and make the living room smell good enough to eat too!

The Waitrose Gingerbread & Shortbread Decorating Kit cost £3.70 when I bought it, but the full price was going up to £4.95, available from Waitrose.