This really is a super yummy, very easy Christmas biscuit recipe. We make several batches each year, as they’re great for decorating the tree, giving as gifts… and eating yourself!
Easy Christmas biscuit recipe
This article is one of our Easy Christmas recipes for children and part of our Christmas activities and crafts for children.
This is very much like a traditional gingerbread recipe, with a few extra spices. It’s a recipe children can make themselves, with some supervision.
The quantities given will make around 30 small star biscuits. Cooking is a wonderful sensory play experience, and really good for showing children how maths and science are applied in every day life.
Here’s the recipe:
Take a very big pan and in it melt: 3oz / 85g of butter 2 tablespoons of golden syrup (honey or corn syrup could be a substitute, although you can’t beat the flavour of golden syrup!) 2oz / 60g of caster (fine) sugar (we use sugar that’s been scented with a vanilla pod)
Don’t let the ingredients boil, and as soon as they have all melted, turn off the heat under the pan.
Then measure out: 7oz/ 200g of plain (all purpose) flour 2 teaspoons of ground ginger 2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon and a grating of fresh nutmeg
Add your dry ingredients to the pan of liquid ingredients and stir together. Dissolve 1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda in 1 tablespoon of water, and add this in too. Stir everything together until it comes together to make a dough.
The dough will be quite oily, which is good because it means you can roll it out, cut out some biscuits, squish, roll out again and cut some more biscuits, without it drying out. But it does also mean it might get stuck to your table.
Rather than coating the table with flour (and drying out your dough) use a piece of baking paper as a board to roll out your dough. The flexibility of the baking paper will make it much easier to lift the biscuits up too.
Stamp out your biscuit shapes until you’ve used up all the dough, and then place the biscuits onto baking paper on baking sheets. If you’re making decorations, remember to make a hole in each biscuit so you can thread your ribbon through.
Bake at Gas 5 / 190 /375 for around 8 minutes if you like your biscuits to be melt-in-your-mouth soft, and for a little longer is you want them crisper, especially if you’re using them as decorations to hang on the tree.
When the biscuits are baked, sprinkle over some more sugar, for a little extra sweetness and a frosty look
Download your ready-made Nativity Unit
Download the Play Academy’s ready-made Nativity Unit and you’ll have everything you need to lead a set of activities to introduce your children to the Nativity story.
This Unit includes artist-drawn puppets/colour-in nativity scene characters and printable Bible verse cards, that your children can use year after year.
In this Nativity teaching unit your children can:
:: learn about the Nativity and create their own Nativity book or small world scene using colour-in puppet / nativity scene characters
:: learn about Mary and Joseph’s journey, and explore junk modelling
:: learn about the shepherds role, and explore loose parts
:: learn about Jesus’ birth
:: learn about the three wise men, and complete their book / re-tell the story in their small world
Bonus Nativity thematic unit printables
The Play Academy’s thematic units come with practical printables that make the lessons more engaging for your children and easier for you to teach.
No need to go searching for printables to accompany your lessons, they’re all included when you download your chosen unit.
In this Nativity Unit you’ll receive these bonus printables:
:: My Nativity Story book to write, colour and complete to tell the Nativity story
:: a set of artist-drawn My Nativity Puppets to colour, cut out and use to re-cap and act out the Nativity story
:: Nativity Vocabulary Cards to recap and consolidate learning
:: Nativity Bible Verse Cards to read, narrate your own acting out of the story, and perhaps to memorise
How to download this Nativity thematic unit
You can download this unit along with over 50 more from NurtureStore’s Play Academy.
If you are already of the Play Academy, you can download this unit straight away from our Library here.
If you are not yet a member, find out more and choose your first unit here. Your teaching is about to get a whole lot easier!
Just tried this recipe. We used a gingerbread man, stocking, moon, and heart cut outs. This is as close to a vegan gingerbread man recipe that I found that my mate (the vegan in the house) really liked.
Oh my goodness! The best biscuits ever, yummie, gorgeous fabulous! Thank you soo much x
easy peasy!! Even I couldn’t get this recipe wrong, taste delicious.
Thank you for this recipe, sounds yummy! It would make shopping a little easier if there was a separate ingredients or materials list included for each and craft. I find myself at the market and shops reading all of the steps over and over even when only one or two things are needed in order to avoid leaving anything behind. Thanks again! My family and I are really enjoy the winter seasons school.