Vickys Gingerbread Men with Christmas & Halloween Decorating Ideas

Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper/baking parchment
Cream the butter and sugar together until light
Add the syrup and mix in
Mix the flour, baking powder and spices together and add to the mixture.
Form a dough adding more syrup if required to bring it together
Wrap in clingfilm and refrigerate for half an hour
Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 5/ 190C.
Flour your surface then roll out your dough so it's 1cm thick and cut out your men with a gingerbread men shaped cutter or whatever shape you want to use.
You get neat stamps you can press on instead of decorating with icing like those pictured above
Place on baking tray and bake for 10 minutes - they should be firm but not browned
Rest on tray a further 10 minutes then remove and set on a wire rack to continue cooling
Decorate with piped icing.
Let your imagination guide you.
You could stick sweets to the icing for eyes or buttons!
Hint: For Halloween make some headless, armless or legless by cutting off a leg or whatever and decorate with red icing near the 'injury', scary faces and pipe a skeleton out of icing onto the bodies.
My son loves this!
To make Xmas Stained Glass Cookies, follow the recipe but cut circles out of your main cookie shapes
Bash some boiled sweets or lollipops with a rolling pin to breal them into smaller pieces and spoon into the holes in your cookies
Poke a hole near the top of each cookie so when its baked you can thread a ribbon through and hang on your xmas tree or in front of your window