Decorating gingerbread is one of my favorite holiday tasks because you can just hunker down with a few episodes of Breaking Bad and a tray of cookies, and before long, you have a stack of lovely edible gifts. It's far more relaxing than gift-shopping, picking out a tree, or, heaven help me, hanging garlands.
Here are some tricks that will work for any size or shape of snowflake cookie cutters. Mix and match these for a whole batch of unique snowflakes. If you want to hang these on your tree as decorations, you can use a plastic straw to punch a hole in the cookie before baking it, and afterwards string some ribbon through it.
1. Get your frosting right: The ideal frosting for icing cookies will have the texture of melted chocolate at room temperature. I like to cream together two tablespoons of unsalted butter with about a cup of powdered sugar, and then add one or two tablespoons of milk, until the texture is right. You can also take a tip from Alice Medrich and skip the frosting altogether.
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Scoop about 1/4 cup of the frosting into a small ziplock bag. Squeeze out any air bubbles and seal the bag. Cut a tiny hole in one corner (about one millimeter wide).
2. Creating a template: Make a small dot of frosting in the very center of the cookie. Draw steady, straight lines connecting each of the six (or 12, if you like) most prominent points of the cookie to this center dot. This will give you a helpful starting template for your snowflake design.
3. When in doubt, start with V's: To get started, draw sets of three or four stacked V's at the snowflake's points, with the angular end pointing towards the center of cookie. You can be a little creative here and make your V's frilly or curly, but it looks best if they are all more or less uniform.
4. Diamonds, dots, and teardrops: Once you're done with the basic lines of the snowflake, try filling in the empty spaces with little diamonds, dots, and teardrops to make the design look more detailed. Diamonds look great at the very tips of the stars' points, and dots and teardrops are helpful for filling in oddly shaped spaces.
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5: The six-point star: The middle of the cookie can get a little messy with all of those lines meeting in one place, so I like to cover it up with a little six-point star. I just make a big dot of frosting in the middle, and then taper it outward into six points.
