Star Cookie Cutters, Set of 5
Take chilled dough out of the refrigerator. Place between sheets of
parchment paper and roll out to desired thickness. We used our
perfect dough rolling pin and the 3/16-inch rings and rolled our dough out perfectly, with no lumps or bumps.
You can also make this star tree with 1/4-inch thick cookies.
Use cookie cutters and cut out your stars. You will need 5 to 6 cookies for each star size and one extra small star for the top.
It was very hot the day we baked these cookies so we left the cutters on the dough and removed the excess with
our tapered icing spatula. Remove the cutters before baking. Then slide the parchment paper and cut-out cookies onto a jumbo cookie sheet.
Bake gingerbread cookies about a minute longer than the recipe calls for, or until the edges
start to turn brown. You need to overbake a little because you need a firm cookie to build the star tree.
Baking cookies on
parchment paper makes it easy to slide hot cookies onto a
cooling rack.
Parchment paper also prevents cookies from spreading.
You will need at least 26 cookies to form a tree that measures about 11-1/4 inches tall when complete.
Stack your star cookies. Stick the layers together with stiff royal icing. If you don't plan to eat your tree you can use hot glue. The number and thickness of cookies you use will determine the height of your tree. We used five of the largest star cookies for our base.
As you build your tree, rotate the corners of the stars so that the tips are staggered.
We used 25 stars in our tree stack. At this point the tree measures 8-1/2 inches tall.
We saved one small star for the top.
We kept the decorations simple for our gingerbread cookie tree. We used white royal icing to decorate the tips of the stars. We sprinkled the wet icing with
white sugar crystals and topped each tip with
green sugar pearls. The top star was outlined with icing, sprinkled with crystal sugar and placed on top. This tree is fun to make, easy to decorate and smells wonderful!