Easy Christmas Cookies to Bake With Toddlers They’ll Be Proud Of

Christmas baking with a toddler doesn’t need to involve perfect gingerbread houses, complicated icing or a kitchen full of specialist equipment.

Some of the best things to bake together are the simplest: a soft piece of dough to roll, a cutter they can press down themselves and a little bottle of icing to squeeze rather enthusiastically over the finished biscuits.

These easy Christmas biscuits are designed with little hands in mind. The dough uses just a handful of ingredients, and you can turn one batch into Christmas people, stars, trees or whatever takes your toddler’s fancy.

They won’t all look perfect. That’s rather the point.

When a child has rolled the dough, cut out their own biscuit and decorated it themselves, the finished result feels genuinely theirs — something they can proudly put on a plate for the family or leave out for Father Christmas.

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Why this is a lovely first Christmas bake

There are plenty of elaborate Christmas biscuit recipes online. This isn’t one of them.

For toddlers, I think the fun comes from being able to do as much as possible themselves. With these biscuits, they can help:

• tip ingredients into the bowl
• mix the dough
• roll it out
• press down the cutters
• transfer the shapes with help
• squeeze on the icing
• add their own decorations

If you use gingerbread-person cutters, each biscuit can even become its own little character. Give them buttons, funny faces, coconut hair or wildly uneven icing clothes. There really isn’t a wrong way to decorate one.

What you’ll need

• Large mixing bowl
• Wooden spoon or silicone spatula
• Rolling pin — a small child-sized one is nice if your toddler wants their own
• Gingerbread-person Christmas cutters and stars/trees if you want variety
• Baking tray
• Baking paper or reusable silicone baking mat
• Small piping bottles — probably the most useful addition for toddler decorating; fill them with your thick glacé icing
• Small bowls — for freeze-dried fruit, coconut and other decorations
• Apron
• A learning tower – optional but very useful

Easy Christmas Biscuit Dough

• 180g unsalted butter, softened
• 90g icing sugar
• ¼ tsp vanilla powder or ½ tsp vanilla extract, optional
• 1 egg yolk
• 360g plain flour
• ¼ tsp salt, optional

Method

1. Mix the butter and sugar.
Put the softened butter and icing sugar into a large bowl and mix until smooth and combined. This is a good job for little hands to help with — although you may want to start the mixing yourself unless you’d like a light dusting of icing sugar over the kitchen.

2. Add the egg yolk and vanilla.
Mix in the egg yolk and vanilla powder or extract, if using.

3. Add the flour.
Add the plain flour and salt and mix until everything starts to come together into a dough. Use your hands towards the end if necessary.

4. Chill the dough.
Shape the dough into a flat disc, cover and chill for around 30 minutes until firm enough to roll easily.

5. Roll and cut.
Lightly flour your work surface and rolling pin, then roll out the dough. Let your toddler press the cutters firmly into it.

Gingerbread-person cutters are particularly fun here even though these aren’t technically gingerbread biscuits. Toddlers can recognise the little people immediately, and every one can look completely different once decorated.

6. Bake.
Transfer the biscuits to a lined baking tray and bake at 160°C for around 20 minutes, or until lightly golden at the edges.

7. Cool completely.
Leave them on the tray briefly before transferring them to a wire rack. Make sure they’re completely cool before decorating.

Make an easy icing toddlers can squeeze themselves

You don’t need royal icing for these.

A simple, thick glacé icing works well and avoids raw egg. The trick is to use very little liquid so it holds its shape when squeezed onto the biscuit.

Thick toddler-friendly icing

• 100g icing sugar
• About 2 tsp water

Mix the icing sugar with the water until very thick and smooth. If necessary, add more water a few drops at a time.

You’re looking for something closer to toothpaste than a runny glaze: when you squeeze a line onto a biscuit, it should stay reasonably defined rather than immediately spreading across the surface.

Spoon the icing into a small icing piping bottle with narrow nozzles and let your toddler decorate.

If it becomes too thin, simply mix in a little more icing sugar.

Naturally colourful Christmas decorations

You don’t need brightly coloured icing or artificial sprinkles to make these feel festive.

A few simple ingredients provide plenty of colour and, importantly, they’re easy for toddlers to pick up and sprinkle themselves.

• For red: crushed freeze-dried raspberries or strawberries
• For white: desiccated coconut
• For brown: melted chocolate or raisins
• For green: finely chopped pistachios, if nuts are suitable for your family

You could put each decoration into a small bowl and let your toddler decide what goes where.

A Christmas biscuit person might get raisin buttons, a white icing jumper and raspberry “shoes”. Another might acquire coconut hair and six buttons. That’s part of the fun.

Just remember that whole or larger pieces of dried fruit and nuts may need to be chopped appropriately for younger children, and always consider allergies and choking risk for your child’s age.

Don’t decorate one for them

This is probably the hardest part.

When you’re baking with a toddler, it’s very tempting to straighten the cutter, redistribute the decorations or quietly fix the icing after they’ve finished.

Try not to.

If the aim is to make something they’ll be proud of, give them at least a few biscuits that are completely theirs.

A wonky Christmas person with one eye, four buttons and an extraordinary quantity of coconut may not belong in a bakery window. But when your toddler carries it over to show someone and announces “I made this!”, it’s done exactly what it was supposed to do.

And I’d take that over a perfectly piped Christmas biscuit any day.

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