Little Jo loves to have parties just as much as I do. Each year, I let her have a very small Christmas party for a couple of her closest friends.  At this time of year, that’s all I can handle when it comes to kid parties!  This year, we decided we would have her friends over to decorate gingerbread houses.  A gingerbread house party definitely needs a gingerbread house themed invitation!

I found Wilton’s gingerbread village cookie pan and thought it would be perfect for creating some edible invitations!  If you can’t get the pan, you can just as easily use a gingerbread house cookie cutter or even a gingerbread man cookie cutter would work.

First, I used the recipe on the back of the pan to make sugar cookies.  Yes, I know, these are supposed to be gingerbread houses and not sugar cookie houses but no one in my house likes to eat gingerbread!  The recipe was simple and the houses really did come out of the pan without a problem.  The only issue I had was that the image didn’t impress on the finished cookie as much as I would have liked.  I pushed that dough in there as hard as I could but it didn’t seem to make a difference.  If anyone has any suggestions, I would love to hear them in the comments.

Next, I had to make my icing.  The best icing to use for cookies that will be handled is royal icing, because it dries hard and won’t get messed up in the packaging. I had never made royal icing before but it turned out to be quite easy.  I started out with the recipe on the can of meringue powder, but it was far too thick for me to pipe onto the cookies so I kept adding a teaspoon of water at at time until I got a good consistency.  What’s a good consistency for this?  It’s still really thick but spreadable.  Here’s how mine looked.

Fill a disposable pastry bag fitted with a round #5 decorator tip with the white royal icing.  Now, comes the fun part.  Pipe the outline of your house onto the cookie.  I actually kept the original pan beside me to help me figure out where to draw the lines. 

At this point, the cookies are adorable just as they are but we are going to take them a step further.

I took a small portion of the icing I used to pipe the outline and thinned it out a bit more with some water.  Then, I added gel icing color to make colored icing.  Fill another pasty bag with the color you want to use and just snip off the end.  For this, you don’t need a decorator tip.  The icing should flow out easily and fill in the areas you want covered.  I also used food writers to decorate.  If you look closely, you will notice I colored on the red candy cane stripe with a marker instead of icing.  These edible markers are going to play a huge role in our invitation creation in just a minute. 

Allow the cookie fronts to dry thoroughly and then ice the backs. It may take a couple of hours to dry thoroughly. In fact, if I had been really smart, I would have iced all the backs first and let them dry overnight but I wasn’t.  Lesson learned by me and passed onto you!

To ice the backs, start with a border of thick icing and fill in with smooth, white royal icing. Make sure you do a really thin coat so that it doesn’t crack later when you try to write on it. When the back is dried thoroughly, use your food writers to write the invitation information on the cookie.

Carefully wrap your cookie invitations and mail them to your guests!  Personally, I would love to receive mail that I could eat!