Lemon Gingerbread Easter Cookies

Thanks to Ann Clark for providing Mom Home Guide with the quality cookie cutters used in this post.

My teen daughters and I made gingerbread cookies for the first time ever last Christmas. We loved the cookies so much! Which got us thinking — why is gingerbread often reserved just for Christmas? We thought gingerbread cookies would be equally as fun (and delicious) for Easter!

I reached out to Ann Clark, a Vermont-based maker of tin-plated steel cookie cutters. All cookie cutters are made from USA-made tin plated steel and are certified food safe. Ann Clark sent me the adorable collection of cookie cutters that my daughters and I used to make our Easter gingerbread cookies.

Easter Gingerbread Cookies

For our Easter gingerbread cookies, my daughters and I used the same cookie recipe that we used for our Christmas gingerbread cookies. We got a lot more cookies out of the recipe this time. Even though the Easter cookie cutters we used were plenty large (about 4 inches), the gingerbread men cookie cutters we used for Christmas were extra big.

(courtesy of Mccormick.com)

(makes about 24 gingerbread cookies)

Cookie Ingredients

Easter Gingerbread Cookie Instructions

Mix flour, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, nutmeg and salt in large mixing bowl. Set aside. Beat butter and brown sugar in a separate large mixing bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed until light and fluffy. Add molasses, egg and vanilla, mix well. Gradually beat in flour mixture on low speed until well mixed.

Press dough into a thick flat disk. Wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate 4 hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Roll out dough with a rolling pin to 1/4-inch thickness on a lightly floured work surface.

Cut into Easter cookie shapes.

Bake 8 to 10 minutes on a baking sheet or until edges of cookies are set and just begin to brown.

Remove to a wire cooling rack and cool completely.

Once the cookies are completely cooled, you can decorate them. My daughters and I used a homemade lemon icing to decorate ours. The icing adds a light lemon flavor to the gingerbread cookies. I got the icing recipe from Where is My Spoon.

Lemon Icing Recipe

(courtesy of Where is My Spoon)

2 ½ cups icing sugar
3 ½ + ½ to 1 tablespoons lemon juice

Mix the icing sugar with 3 ½ tablespoons lemon juice until smooth, thick and glossy. Add more drops of lemon juice as necessary. We mixed our icing to be thin enough to be able to spread with a small spatula. What I like about this icing recipe is that it’s super easy to put together and doesn’t involve raw eggs. 

We divided the icing into small bowls and added drops of food coloring to the icing in the bowls to create the icing colors we wanted for our cookies. We used both mini spatulas and toothpicks to decorate our cookies.

We let the icing set for a while before moving the iced gingerbread cookies into covered containers for storage. The cookies should last for up to 5 days.

If you like the shape of our Easter cookies, you might be interested in these Ann Clark Easter cookie cutters:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am so happy that my sweet daughters and I got to make some Easter gingerbread cookies together. We had a fun afternoon and now we have some delicious cookies to share.