We are officially in holiday mode in our household! I finished work on Thursday and the boys finished nursery and school on Friday. No more schools runs for the rest of the year and I had a great feeling of satisfaction switching my alarm off and knowing it wouldn’t have to be set again until 2016!!!

Today’s post is all about cooking with the kids at Christmas.

I have probably mentioned before that we love making gingerbread around this time of year because I love the smell of it wafting through our house! The boys love getting stuck in with kneading the dough and using all sorts of cutters.

Earlier on in the month E and I made a batch of Gingerbread Reindeer for the Christmas Bake sale – they are super easy to do. All you need is a standard gingerbread cutter that you turn upside down to make the reindeer!

Items you will need:

• Gingerbread dough (see below)
• Gingerbread cutters
• Icing
• Smarties
• Wilton Black Icing Tube (black)
• Mini Squeeze bottles

I used this gingerbread recipe from the BBC Food website to make my dough. Once done, we rolled out and cut out various sizes of gingerbread men and baked them in the oven for around 8 minutes (depending on your oven you can do them until they are brown).

Whilst waiting for them to cool I made up the icing using around 250g of icing sugar and around 2-3 tablespoons of water to make up a paste that is of toothpaste texture for decorating the outline. Once you are happy with the texture transfer to your mini squeeze bottle ready to ice the reindeer.

I started off with the antlers first, moving onto the ears, then the eyes. Once done I then used the Wilton Black icing tube to dot the eyes. The Wilton icing tube is great because you can easily use it with a coupler and attach a nozzle to it (I used size 2) but you can, of course, use any black icing or even colour your own up from the batch you made earlier.

Once the eyes were done it was then onto sticking the smartie nose down using a little more black icing before finishing off with the mouth.

And there you go – Gingerbread reindeer! They went down a storm in the cake sale and M even chose to buy one back he liked them so much!

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My London: The Gingerbread House Christmas craft ideas for your little ones How to make Pikachu cookies – tutorial Top tips for hosting Christmas