This is the icing for gingerbread cookies that pipes a clean outline, floods smooth and sets firm enough to stack, plus the frostings worth using instead, sorted by the one thing that really decides between them: when the cookies have to be dry.
Most recipes hand you one icing and stop there. But the easy glaze beginners are sent to takes a full day to firm up, thin royal icing is dry in about two hours, and cream cheese frosting, the best flavor match for gingerbread, never dries at all. Choose on flavor alone and you find out at midnight, holding a tin you cannot close.
Below is a glossy cookie icing for a batch of 24, a clock that matches the icing to your deadline, a batch calculator, the frostings for cookies eaten the same day, and a troubleshooting table for the ways icing goes wrong.
Glossy Icing for Gingerbread Cookies
Covers about 24 standard cookies · Easy · Prep 10 minutes · No bake · Dry 24 hours before stacking · Total about 24 hours
Equipment: a fine-mesh sieve, a whisk, a small bowl for each color, piping bags or squeeze bottles, a toothpick.
Ingredients
- 3 cups (360g) powdered sugar, sifted
- 4 to 5 tablespoons milk, whole or 2%, or a plant milk for dairy free
- 2 teaspoons light corn syrup
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- A pinch of salt
- Gel food coloring, optional
Method
- Sift the powdered sugar into a medium bowl and discard any hard lumps left in the sieve.
- Whisk in 4 tablespoons of the milk with the corn syrup, vanilla and salt until you have a thick, smooth paste.
- Adjust with more milk a quarter teaspoon at a time until a ribbon drizzled off the whisk sinks back into the surface in about 10 seconds.
- Tint each portion with gel color before any final thinning, mixing a shade lighter than you want because the color deepens as it dries.
- Pipe an outline just inside the edge of each completely cooled cookie with the 10-second icing.
- Flood inside each outline with a portion thinned by a few more drops of milk, then nudge it into the corners with a toothpick.
- Dry the cookies uncovered in a single layer for 24 hours before stacking or packing them.
Nutrition, per cookie’s share of the icing, approximate: 62 calories. Nutrition figures are estimates calculated from ingredient quantities and are not a substitute for laboratory analysis.
Notes: adapted from Sally’s Baking Addiction’s easy cookie icing, with milk in place of water at the ratio Allrecipes uses for its gingerbread cookie icing. Leave out the corn syrup for a faster, matte glaze that is stackable in a few hours rather than a day.
Which Icing to Use, Decided by the Clock
The right icing for gingerbread cookies depends less on taste than on timing. Here is how long each one takes before the cookies can touch each other, which is the moment that matters if they are going into a tin, a gift bag or the mail.
| Icing | What it is | Dry enough to stack | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quick milk glaze | Powdered sugar, milk and vanilla | 2 to 4 hours, longer when humid | Kids, dipping, drizzles |
| Glossy cookie icing, the card above | The same glaze with corn syrup | 24 hours | Smooth, shiny floods that stack and travel in a tin |
| Royal icing | Powdered sugar and meringue powder | About 2 hours in a thin layer, overnight when flooded thick | Faces, lettering, anything mailed |
| Butter frosting | Butter and powdered sugar | Never, it crusts but stays soft | Same-day cookies and sprinkles |
| Cream cheese frosting | Cream cheese, butter and powdered sugar | Never, and it needs the fridge | The best flavor with gingerbread, eaten today |
Read down the middle column and the pattern is the opposite of what most people expect. The easy icing is the slow one. The corn syrup glaze is the icing every beginner is pointed to, and Sally’s Baking Addiction, whose recipe our card adapts, puts it at 24 hours to dry against about two for her royal icing. Bless This Mess gives the same full day before stacking. Royal icing has a reputation for being fussy, and it is, but in a thin layer it is the fastest icing here to finish.
That trade is what we call the Icing Clock. Every icing sits somewhere between fast but fiddly and slow but forgiving, and the right one is simply the most forgiving icing that will still be dry by your deadline. The tool below does the matching for you.
The Icing Clock
Tell it when the cookies have to go into a tin, who is decorating and the look you want. It picks the icing that will actually be dry by then, and shows you why the others will not.
Pick your deadline.
Dry enough to stack
When to start icing
| Icing | Dry enough to stack | For your deadline |
|---|
Drying times are typical ranges published by Sally’s Baking Addiction, Bless This Mess and Wilton, and the royal icing curing table on our own icing page. They are not measurements from a test kitchen, and humidity, icing thickness and cookie size all move them. Food safety times follow USDA guidance and are general information, not medical advice. Nothing you choose here leaves your browser.
If the cookies are eaten off the tray the same day, ignore the clock and choose on flavor, where the frostings win. If they have to be packed tonight, use royal icing for lines or the quick glaze for coverage. If you have a full day, the glossy icing gives the best finish of the icings that set. And if anything is going in the mail, use royal icing, because it is the one that dries hard all the way through.
Picture a cookie swap on Saturday morning. You bake on Friday afternoon and flood two dozen gingerbread cookies with the glossy icing at eight in the evening, planning to tin them before bed. At eleven they look finished and feel dry on top. Stack them and every cookie takes a print from the one above, and by morning a few are stuck together. Flood the same tray in royal icing and it is ready to pack by the time you are. The icing was fine. The clock was wrong.
Ingredient Notes
Powdered sugar, sifted. Lumps that survive the whisk end up clogging a piping tip halfway round a cookie. Sifting takes a minute and removes the problem before it starts.
Milk rather than water. Milk gives a slightly richer flavor than the water most corn syrup icings use, and it is what the quick glaze on our gingerbread cookie recipe is built on, so the two recipes behave the same way in the bowl. Any milk works, including a plant milk if you need the icing dairy free.
Light corn syrup, and what it costs you. Corn syrup does two jobs. It gets in the way of the sugar re-forming into crystals as the icing dries, which is why a corn syrup icing dries glossy instead of dull, and it keeps the bite softer than royal icing. The price is time. Corn syrup also holds on to water, which is part of why this icing takes a full day to firm up. Leave it out when you are short of time and the glaze sets matte, faster and a little firmer.
Gel color, not liquid. Gel coloring adds very little liquid, so it will not thin your icing the way a bottle of liquid color can. Even so, tint before your final thinning, and mix each color a shade lighter than you want. Sally's Baking Addiction notes that the color deepens as the icing dries.
Meringue powder, for royal icing only. Royal icing needs egg white to set hard. The traditional version uses fresh egg white, and the FDA's egg safety guidance recommends pasteurized eggs or pasteurized egg products for any recipe where the eggs are eaten raw. Meringue powder, which is dried egg white with sugar and stabilizers, is the swap most decorators reach for, and it is what our royal icing uses.
The card makes enough to flood about 24 standard cookies. For a different count, size or style of decorating, the calculator below scales it.
The Icing Batch Calculator
How much icing to make for your tray. It scales the recipe card by how many cookies you have, how big they are, and how much of each one you are covering.
Powdered sugar
Recipe card batches
These are estimates. The base is the recipe card, which covers about 24 standard cookies fully flooded according to its source recipe. Other sizes and coverages are scaled by cookie area and by our estimate of how much icing each style uses, so round up if you are unsure. Nothing you enter here leaves your browser.
How to Make Gingerbread Cookie Icing Step by Step
The card covers the quantities. These are the checkpoints that tell you each stage is done.
1. Sift the powdered sugar
Sift into a medium bowl and throw away the few hard lumps left behind in the sieve. They will not dissolve, however long you whisk.
2. Whisk in the milk, corn syrup, vanilla and salt
Start with 4 tablespoons of milk. It will look far too dry at first. Keep whisking until it comes together into a thick paste and the whisk leaves a trail that holds its shape.
3. Adjust to a 10-second ribbon
Add more milk a quarter teaspoon at a time. Lift the whisk and let a ribbon of icing fall back into the bowl. When it sinks back into the surface in about 10 seconds, you have piping consistency, the same test our cookie recipe uses. A quarter teaspoon is a bigger change than it looks, so go slowly.
4. Tint each bowl before you thin it
Divide the icing into a small bowl per color and stir in gel color with a toothpick. Mix each one a shade paler than the color you are after, because it deepens as it dries.
5. Pipe the outlines onto cooled cookies
Check the underside of a cookie first. If it feels warm, wait: icing on a warm cookie loosens and slides off the edge. Pipe a line just inside the edge of each cookie. It should hold its shape and sit up slightly.
6. Flood inside each outline
Thin a portion of each color with a few more drops of milk, until it levels itself in the bowl within a few seconds. Fill inside the outline, then nudge the icing into the corners and pop any bubbles with a toothpick. The surface should smooth over by itself.
7. Dry them uncovered for 24 hours
Leave the cookies in a single layer, uncovered, somewhere cool and dry. The icing is ready when it is matte all over and has no give when you press it gently at the thickest point. It feels dry to the touch within an hour or two, but stackable takes the full day.
Royal Icing, for Cookies That Have to Travel
Royal icing is the one to use when cookies are being mailed, handed out in bags, or piped with fine detail like faces, lettering and lace. It sets hard, holds a raised line, and in a thin layer it dries in about two hours, according to Sally's Baking Addiction.
The recipe, with the stiff and loose consistencies you need, is on our page on royal icing for gingerbread houses. The cookie version is the same icing, thinned. Three things change when it goes on cookies instead of walls:
- Thin it more than you think. Mortar-grade icing is stiff enough to hold a wall. For cookies you want outline icing that still flows a little, and flood icing loose enough to level itself.
- Let outlines crust before you flood. About 15 minutes stops the flood from breaking through the line you just piped.
- Give thick floods the night. A thin line is dry in a couple of hours. A thick flood takes far longer, so plan on overnight before anything touches it.
If children are decorating, royal icing works for kids of about five and up, as long as nobody is squeezing one big shared bag. Pre-fill small bags, one per child per color, and tie each one off at the top so nothing escapes out the back. For under fives, skip piping altogether.
Frosting for Gingerbread Cookies You Eat the Same Day
Frosting for gingerbread cookies does a different job from icing. It does not set, so the cookies cannot be stacked, but it tastes better, and on a soft cookie eaten that afternoon it is the right call. Two are worth making.
Cream cheese frosting is the classic match, because its tang cuts through the molasses. Beat 4 ounces of softened cream cheese with 2 tablespoons of softened butter until smooth, then beat in 1 1/2 to 2 cups of powdered sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla and a pinch of cinnamon.
The catch nobody puts in the recipe: cream cheese frosting is a dairy food that never dries, so it follows the rule for perishable food. The USDA's Danger Zone guidance says food should not sit out of the refrigerator for more than two hours, or one hour above 90F, and America's Test Kitchen applies the same two-hour line to cream cheese frosting. That rules cream cheese frosted cookies out of a tin on the counter, a cookie swap or the mail. Serve them within two hours, then move what is left to the fridge.
Say you are hosting a decorating party for eight kids between three and nine, from two until four in the afternoon. The cream cheese frosting is the most popular bowl on the table, and by four o'clock it has been out for two hours. That is the line. Everything frosted goes straight into the fridge, and the half-used bowl goes in with it rather than waiting on the counter while you clean up.
Butter frosting is the answer for the family that wants the taste of the canned frosting they grew up with. Beat half a cup of softened butter with 2 cups of powdered sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla and a splash of milk until fluffy. Because butter holds very little water, a simple butter and sugar frosting is fine at room temperature for a day or two, according to America's Test Kitchen. It forms a light crust but stays soft underneath, so keep these cookies in one layer.
If you are frosting rather than icing, start with a cookie built to be soft, like our chewy gingerbread cookies. A thin, crisp cut-out softens under a thick layer of frosting and loses the snap that made it worth icing.
Icing on a Dark Cookie
Gingerbread is a dark base, and icing is not fully opaque. That changes how colors land, and it catches people out with white.
A thin coat of white icing over brown gingerbread reads as a dull, see-through grey rather than white, because the cookie shows through. Cake decorators lay marzipan under royal icing for exactly this reason. The fix is two coats with a crust in between, or piped white lines, which carry enough icing to read white where a thin flood does not.
Dark colors work the other way. Black and deep red come out more easily on gingerbread than on a pale sugar cookie, because the brown base does some of the darkening for you. Our Halloween gingerbread cookie recipe shows how each color lands on gingerbread next to the same icing on a sugar cookie.
Picture a tray of snowmen, flooded white in one coat at the same time as the rest of the batch. Next to the green trees and red mittens they look finished. Next to each other they look grey, and patchy where the flood ran thinner at the edges. A second coat, laid on once the first has crusted, is what turns them white.
Decorating Ideas for Gingerbread Cookies
Most gingerbread cookie decorating ideas come down to a handful of techniques. Here they are, sorted from the one a three-year-old can manage to the one that wants a steady hand, with the icing each one needs.
- Frost and sprinkle. Spread butter or cream cheese frosting on with the back of a spoon and let little ones bury it in sprinkles. This is the one for under fives.
- Dip the tops. Dip the face of each cookie into the quick glaze, let the excess drip off, and set it on a rack. One motion, no bags, and a whole tray is done in minutes.
- Drizzle zigzags. Snip the tip off a bag of glaze and run fast lines back and forth across a tray of cookies.
- Faces and buttons. Two eyes, a smile and three buttons, piped in stiff royal icing so the dots hold their shape. It is the classic finish for gingerbread people, and because their arms and legs are the parts most likely to snap, decorate them flat on the tray.
- Rickrack arms and legs. A wavy line of royal icing across each wrist and ankle, the look most people picture for a gingerbread man.
- Flooded sweaters. Flood the body in color with the glossy icing, then add buttons and stripes in royal icing once the flood has crusted.
- Wet-on-wet dots and hearts. Drop dots of a second color into a flood while it is still wet and they sink in flat. Drag a toothpick through each dot to turn it into a heart.
- Snowflakes on bare gingerbread. Skip the flood and pipe white royal icing snowflakes straight onto the cookie. The brown shows between the lines, which is the point.
If you are planning a decorating afternoon for mixed ages, set up two stations: a frosting and sprinkles table for the youngest, and pre-filled bags of glaze or royal icing for everyone old enough to squeeze one without it ending up on the table.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Icing runs off the edge | Icing too thin, cookie still warm, or cookie domed in the oven | Thicken the outline icing with a spoonful of sugar, wait until the cookies are cool underneath, and bake flat cookies in the first place |
| Colors bleed into each other | A wet flood laid against another wet flood | Let the first section crust until it is matte before you flood the one beside it |
| Still tacky the next day | Too much milk, a humid kitchen, or the corn syrup icing not given its full day | Move the tray to the coolest, driest room in the house. Do not put it in the fridge, where condensation makes it worse |
| Dull, grainy or blotchy finish | Sugar re-forming crystals as the icing dries | Add the corn syrup; it is what keeps the finish glossy |
| White looks grey | The dark cookie showing through a thin coat | Two coats with a crust between, or piped lines instead of a flood |
| Cookies stuck together in the tin | Stacked before the icing was dry | Check the icing against the clock above, and lay parchment between the layers |
| Cream cheese frosting slides or weeps | Frosted onto warm cookies, or left in a warm room | Frost only fully cooled cookies and refrigerate within two hours |
| Royal icing cracked on a soft cookie | Hard icing on a cookie that bends | Use the glossy icing or a frosting on soft cookies, and keep royal icing for firm cut-outs |
Make-Ahead and Timeline
Work backwards from the moment the cookies go into a tin, not from when you start baking.
- Glossy icing: ice the day before. It needs the full 24 hours.
- Quick glaze: ice on the morning you pack them, and give them at least 2 to 4 hours.
- Royal icing: about two hours for simple lines, overnight for thick floods or layered designs.
- Frostings: frost within two hours of serving.
Icing can be mixed ahead. Press plastic wrap onto the surface so it does not crust, keep milk-based icing in the fridge, and whisk it again before using, adding a drop of milk if it has stiffened.
Say the school bake sale is Thursday morning and the cookies need to be bagged by Wednesday night. Bake on Tuesday, ice with the glossy icing on Tuesday evening, and they have their full day by Wednesday evening. Bake on Wednesday instead and the glossy icing will not make it, so switch to the quick glaze, or royal icing for lines, and the same cookies are ready to bag by bedtime.
Storage Instructions
Once the icing is completely dry, glazed and royal-iced cookies keep like undecorated ones: in an airtight tin at room temperature for about 5 days, with parchment between the layers. They freeze for up to 3 months. Thaw them still sealed, so condensation forms on the container rather than on the icing, where it can make colors bleed.
Frosted cookies are different. Cream cheese frosted cookies go in the fridge, covered, and are best eaten within a few days, since the cookie softens under the frosting as it sits. Butter frosted cookies keep at room temperature for a day or two, in a single layer.
Leftover icing keeps covered in the fridge for a few days. Let it come back to room temperature and whisk it before you use it.
FAQ
What icing hardens on gingerbread cookies?
Royal icing hardens fully, and in a thin layer it is the fastest, at about two hours. A powdered sugar glaze with corn syrup also sets firm enough to stack, but it takes about 24 hours. A plain milk glaze sets to a softer finish in a few hours. Butter and cream cheese frostings never harden.
What icing goes best with gingerbread?
For flavor, cream cheese frosting, because its tang cuts the molasses. Lemon is the other classic pairing: swap a tablespoon of the milk in the glaze for lemon juice. For looks, and for cookies that have to keep, a vanilla glaze or royal icing.
Can I use canned frosting on gingerbread cookies?
Yes, for cookies eaten that day. Canned frosting is made to stay soft and spreadable, so it will not set and the cookies cannot be stacked. If that is the flavor your family wants, the butter frosting above gets close.
Can I use the icing from a gingerbread house kit on cookies?
Usually, for cookies you eat soon. Most kits ship a ready-made pouch rather than a mix you prepare. It is fine for decorating, but it does not set as hard as fresh royal icing, so do not plan on stacking them.
Do gingerbread cookies with cream cheese frosting need to be refrigerated?
Yes, once they have been out for two hours, or one hour on a day above 90F. Cream cheese frosting does not dry, so it is handled as a perishable food. Keep them covered in the fridge.
How do I make icing for gingerbread cookies without corn syrup?
Leave it out. You get a quick milk glaze that sets matte and a little faster, which is the version on our cookie recipe page. You lose some shine, and the finish can dry slightly dull.
Can I make icing for gingerbread cookies without eggs?
Yes. The glossy icing on this page and both frostings contain no egg. Royal icing does, even when it is made with meringue powder, because meringue powder is dried egg white. Use a plant milk in the glaze if you also need it dairy free.
How long does icing take to dry on gingerbread cookies?
Most icings feel dry to the touch within an hour or two. Dry enough to stack is another matter: about two hours for royal icing in a thin layer, 2 to 4 hours for a plain milk glaze, and about 24 hours for a corn syrup icing like the one on this card. Humidity and thick coats add time.
More Gingerbread Recipes
The icing is the last step. If you still need the cookies and would rather skip the baking, our comparison of every gingerbread cookie mix worth buying ranks the boxed options on how much work they actually save. For something bigger than a cookie, the same royal icing holds a house together once it is mixed stiffer.
Decorate Your Gingerbread with Best Gingerbread Houses
Best Gingerbread Houses is built around one question most recipes skip: what does the gingerbread have to survive after it leaves the oven? For cookies, the answer is a tin, a gift bag or a tray of small hands, and the icing is where that is decided. When the cookies are done and you want to build something with a roof on it, start with the gingerbread house kits graded on their icing, because the icing in the box is the part that decides whether the house stays up.