Poinsettia Cookie Platter,Gingerbread Cookie Gift Tags and & Merry Merry

Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas!  Here in Germany we celebrated Heligabend yesterday with a big family dinner and presents. Today is a veg out day.

I’ve been taking cooking lessons from my mother-in-law, making the family’s favorite Christmas recipes and recording them. Will be hard to wait a whole year to post them!

I also had several cookie decorating sessions with my twin nieces. Fun! For my mother-in-law who has an endless stream of visitors, I made this quick poinsettia cookie platter. An amazing idea by the ueber talented Sweet Sugarbelle. Her instructions are here. This lovely platter was was so easy to do and in creating it, I polished off leftover cookie dough and a lot of the leftover royal icing.

My version used metallic gold dragees to cover the middle cookie and I also used edible red sparkle sugar on half of the leaves cuz you know I can’t resist the sparkle. I can’t want to do this again next year in different colors but I might have to do some experimenting with spring flowers as well.

Using the same cutter used for the poinsettia center, I created gingerbread cookie gift tags to match the wrapping paper. These were fun to do. I has these little sugar letters on hand which I sorted out into the name of each family member then painted with edible gold.

I cut out the cookies and used a chopstick to make a hole in the top part before baking. Again using up leftover royal icing, I adjusted the colors to match the paper and the cookies were iced and then trimmed with a stiffer icing version.

The free form star shaped flowers are royal icing transfers I made with a petal tip accented in the middle with an edible pearl. Once the cookies had dried completely, I strung them though the ribbons I used on the packages for something a little different under the tree!