Grandma's Most Loved Gingerbread Bears

A Gingerbread Tradition Worth Passing Down

These gingerbread bear cookies deliver a properly old-school holiday cookie. Light brown sugar and molasses sweeten the dough, while a quartet of warm spices, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, gives every cookie that classic gingerbread aroma you can smell across the kitchen.

The long 3-to-4-hour chill is non-skippable. Rolled gingerbread dough needs that cold rest to firm up enough to handle, and chilled dough holds the shape of cookie cutters far better than warm dough. Skip it and your bears spread into amorphous blobs.

The royal icing painted on with artist’s brushes is what turns these from cookies into edible art. Five cups of powdered sugar beaten with cream of tartar and four egg whites whips into a stiff icing that thins out beautifully with a few drops of water for painting consistency. Divided and tinted with food coloring, it lets little hands and patient adults create faces, vests, and bowties on each bear.

Pro Tips

• Roll the dough between two sheets of parchment instead of on a floured surface. No sticking, no extra flour toughening the cookie.
• Cut the dough cold and slide the parchment with shapes onto the cookie sheet. Picking up individual cookies often distorts the shape.
• Pull the cookies as soon as the edges show light brown. Gingerbread that bakes longer turns hard and brittle instead of crisp-tender.
• Cover icing bowls with damp paper towels under plastic wrap. Royal icing forms a skin within minutes and gets unworkable.
• Let painted cookies dry undisturbed for 2 full hours before stacking. Touching tacky icing smudges the design.

Variations

• Swap molasses for maple syrup for a softer, less assertive sweetness.
• Add ½ teaspoon ground cardamom or black pepper to the spice blend for a more complex profile.
• Skip the painted icing and dust finished cookies with powdered sugar for a quicker presentation.