For anyone wanting to know how I make the Christmas cookies I upload here.
Okay, so first there's the dough. I either use gingerbread dough, or Linzer dough. When baked, the former is firm*, thus easier to draw on, but also darker and almost impossible to correct drawing mistakes on when using chocolate; even if you scratch the wrong line or blot away, the darker patch is still there. Linzer dough is better in that aspect; it's so fuzzy and soft that the upper layer comes away easily; it's also lighter in colour, thus the chocolate design stands out better. The downside is its softness - it crumbles away at the lightest pressure, so the touches must be absolutely light.
* If, like me, you roll the dough very thin (1-3 mm), watch out for wrinkles on your baking paper and for humidity in your apartment; both tend to cause gingerbread dough to twist and bend.
Shapes. Most of the stuff I show here is drawn on completely random shapes of leftover dough. I love the moment of surprise there, the challenge in determining what the shape reminds me of; this way, I get the weirdest cookies, like a Peruvian mara that I drew last year. It's kind of like watching the clouds in the sky and guessing what they look like.
The other shapes - foxes, butterflies etc - are made with cookie cutters. We've got generic ones that are commonly sold in stores (hearts, bells, spruces), and also some modified shapes that were made by soldering generic shapes into more specific ones (churches, dogs, horses).
Now for decorating - for all designs, I use toothpicks to draw. Since all of our cookies are pretty tiny, it's just not possible to draw details or fine lines with something larger. Round toothpicks are suitable for drawing thin lines, while flat, less pointy ones (of late absent from local stores, unfortunately) are great for drawing textures such as wood, fur, hair or needles.
We strive for a 'natural' look in our cookies, so we don't use overly glaring colours such as neon-green, and completely avoid shop-sold sprinkles and pastry bags filled with colourful icings. Those are too sweet and chemical-tasting for my palate, and detract from the taste of the cookie itself.
We only use two types of icing - dark chocolate icing (repeatedly melted icing for cakes), and home-made sugar icing ( 1 egg white mixed with 100 g powdered sugar until the mixture is smooth; I add powdered food colouring to draw e.g. piglets or pears). If you're afraid of listeria in egg whites, you may not want to prepare this particular icing.
With chocolate, most melted chocolates and icings don't react well when diluted with water (usually, a single solid clump forms out of the icing), so the only key to keeping it fluid enough to decorate is keeping the bowl in a pot filled with hot water, and often re-heating it.
With the sugar icing, too little egg white gives a very thick, snow-white icing, ideal for drawing, um, snow. Also, it's great for drawing on chocolate background if you don't mind the time it takes to get this rather solid icing to form a line. Too big an egg white gives a slightly yellowed but hard and glass-smooth surface, perfect for drawing on with chocolate; it's ideal for backgrounds. One can easily overdo it with diluting sugar icing with water, so be careful about the amount of water you add; one teaspoonful is often enough.
It's also good to use all of your sugar icing on one go; it happens quite often that within several hours when you're not using and stirring it, a crust forms on it which, no matter how much you stir and squish it afterwards, leaves solid clusters in the icing.
Among the cookies I make, the ones which are the most demanding on one's time are 3-layer ones. Not that I recommend using 3 completely overlapping layers of icing - eeks, no; I don't even like a single layer if it's too thick, except when it's on a cake. I meant ones that one needs to decorate on 3 ocassions because of the long time it takes for the sugar icing to crust; such as cookie-babies (white swaddle/linen background -> pink head & hands -> chocolate face details & ribbon) or countrywomen in folk costumes (chocolate face & skirt -> white bonnet, blouse, apron & stockings -> chocolate shoes and bodice).
That's pretty much it.