Christmas Tree Cookies 

By Kirsten Hatch

Only seven more days until Christmas, which means the holiday baking season is almost over! Have you made any Christmas cookies yet? Some people use this time to try new, elaborate (and complicated) recipes, while others stick with familiar family favorites. At A Great Surprise, we wanted to make a Christmas classic, with a simple yet creative twist.

So bust out your grandma’s gingerbread recipe! You could also grab a boxed mix from the pantry, or pre-baked cookies from the store. As with real Christmas trees, all the fun is in the decorating anyway.

If you are using a homemade gingerbread recipe, check out these tips to get your cookies to turn out perfect every time.

Once your cookies have completely cooled- or made their way out of the box- you’ll want to gather the rest of your supplies. You will need:

• A tub of Green Icing 
• A small tube of white icing 
• Green sprinkles 
• Even. More. Sprinkles.

If you don’t want to buy two different colors of icing, you could always get plain vanilla and use food dye to get the color you want. We chose green icing as the base to get a consistent color across the whole cookie, and make any gaps in the sprinkles less obvious. 

Start by pouring your green sprinkles into a shallow bowl, then ice your tree cookies with your green icing. We would recommend tracing the shape of the cookie by putting the green icing in a piping bag. Then, fill in the outline you drew with additional icing and use a knife to smooth it out and fill in any gaps you may have missed. 

One by one, place your iced cookies face-down into the green sprinkles and press them down gently. When you lift them out, you’ll see that the green sprinkles have stuck to the icing to create the look and texture of pine needles.

Now you can pick up your tube of white icing and pipe a zig-zag pattern or a series of diagonal stripes onto your cookies to make garlands. In our example, we used Rainbow Nonpareils, Pastel Nonpareils, and Pastel Confetti sprinkles, but you could always use different jimmy sprinkles as well. 

Originally, we pressed the cookies down into the sprinkles for the garlands, but that flattened and spread the icing. For the best results, we would recommend sprinkling your chosen sprinkles onto the wet icing to preserve the lines that you piped. Try to do this over a wide bowl to catch the excess. You may need to do multiple applications and lightly press the sprinkles into the icing to get the fullest and most secure coverage.

And now your trees are decorated and ready for the holidays! Whether you’re making these for a Christmas party or for a holiday movie marathon at home, these Christmas tree cookies are sure to make the season bright. But don’t forget to save some for Santa!

Need a different size or can’t find what you’re looking for? Be sure to visit our Amazon page for more options. Search by color or candy type to find exactly what you need!