How to Decorate Christmas Biscuits

Use your favourite biscuit or gingerbread recipe. Roll out the chilled dough and cut out the shapes with the Christmas cutters. When baked, leave them to go completely cold before decorating.

All biscuits are iced with Royal Icing. The consistency is really important as the biscuits are outlined and filled in with the same icing. It is easier to mix up a batch of white royal icing with the correct consistency first and then divide this into separate bowls for colouring with food colours.

The consistency is ‘20 second icing’ which means that when you run a knife through the surface of your bowl of icing it will take approximately 20 seconds (with a bit of a shake!) for the icing to flatten out again. It needs to be stiff enough to outline your biscuits without running over the edge but also runny enough that the icing will flatten out when you flood the biscuit with it. You can make up a large batch of royal icing by using powdered Royal Icing sugar and adding water in a stand mixer fitted with a paddle.

If you only need a small amount of icing then ready-made Royal Icing is a great time saver - just decant what you need into a bowl and adjust the consistency using water, a few drops at a time to make it runnier or add more icing sugar to make it stiffer.

Transfer the icing to a piping bag fitted with a small writing nozzle. When you have piped the outline, fill in the rest of the biscuit straightaway and use a scribe tool to pop any air bubbles and neaten any wobbly edges. Give the biscuit a quick shake from side to side on your work surface to help the icing to settle flat.

Top tip: use a stiffer consistency of royal icing for piping details.

20 second icing in green. Stiff icing in red and white.

Outline the tree and fill in the main body of the biscuit with the green icing. When this has set, pipe zig zags across the tree from top to bottom with the white icing. Pipe red baubles/lights on the white lines and add a star sprinkle at the top.

20 second icing in white and red. Stiff icing in green.

Outline the candy cane with white icing. Pipe diagonal lines across. Fill in every other diagonal with white icing. Pipe a fine line of green over each white diagonal whilst the icing is still wet. Let the white set for 10 minutes and fill in the empty diagonals with red icing.

20 second icing in green. Stiff icing in red and white.

Outline and fill in the holly leaf with the green icing. When this has set, pipe a white line lengthways through the middle. Pipe red icing for the holly berries.

20 second icing in blue. Stiff icing in white.

Outline the bell and fill in the main body of the bell with the blue icing. Pipe the clapper (hanging part inside the bell). When the icing has set, decorate with a white piped snowflake and a highlight around the rim.