Kid Recipe: Ginger Snap Holiday Cookies
A holiday cookie perfect for gifting and sharing
Ginger snap cookies are the sort of classic holiday cookies that feel festive before you even taste them. With warm spices, sweet molasses, and that signature crackly, sparkly top, they’re a joyful bake and a perfect recipe for kids to make on their own. They hold up well in the freezer, and stay fresh in a container for days, which makes them ideal for holiday gifting.
One of the most meaningful parts of this recipe is the emphasis on sharing. So much holiday gift-giving is rooted in consumerism, but baking gives kids the chance to offer something made with their own hands, with their own labor, and with care. It’s a small but powerful lesson in empathy, creativity, and community. These cookies give kids a chance to think about who they want to bake for and how their work can bring someone else joy.
This recipe also supports early kitchen independence. It uses straightforward steps, tactile mixing moments, and a fun finishing step of rolling the dough in sugar to get that festive shimmer. The techniques here, melting butter safely, combining wet and dry ingredients, rolling dough, and spacing cookies on a baking sheet, are foundational skills they’ll use in countless future bakes.
Ginger snaps cookies are delicious and ideal to give as gifts. But as important, they offer kids the chance to feel the pride and joy of giving something they made themselves to someone they care about.
Ways to mix it up
Hot oven
Mixing dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately
Molasses: Use unsulphured molasses. Grandma’s Original is my go-to. It’s thick and sticky like honey, so expect a bit of mess (all part of the fun). If you’re not using a scale, lightly oil the inside of your measuring cup so the molasses slides out more easily.
Butter: Always choose unsalted butter for baking. It gives you control over the salt in the recipe. Kids will melt the butter in the microwave, so set out a microwave-safe bowl and review microwave safety if necessary.
Eggs: Most baking recipes call for large eggs and all of mine do too. The recipe asks kids to place the eggs in a bowl of water. This helps the egg come to temperature so it is not too cold when added into the mixture with the warm butter later on. Many recipes ask bakers to remove eggs early but that type of forethought is not always possible.
Scale or no scale: This recipe is written with both scaled and non-scaled measurements so your kid can choose the format that feels most accessible (both can be found at the bottom of the page). If you use a scale, check out my article for tips here.
Doubling the recipe (and freezing for later): Because these cookies are perfect for gifting, this is an excellent recipe to double. If you choose to do that, pause and talk through the math with your kid: “We’re multiplying every ingredient by two. If the recipe calls for 2 cups of flour, we need 4 cups, that is 2 × 2.” I recommend writing down the doubled amounts before mixing because it’s easy to forget to stop to do the math in the heat of the moment. Once the dough is rolled in the sugar, you can freeze the balls on a tray and bake directly from frozen—just add 1–2 extra minutes in the oven.
Multiplication, arrays, and cookies: Baking cookies reinforces multiplication concepts in surprising ways. This recipe asks kids to arrange cookie dough balls on their baking sheet in a 3 x 4 array (4 rows of 3). This mirrors how multiplication is introduced in elementary math: as repeated addition organized in rows and columns. Kids should be familiar with this language and structure and might even be excited to see academic vocabulary in their daily life. There is an image in the recipe so kids can see what this should look like if they haven’t yet mastered this concept. You might ask, “If we have 4 rows of 3 cookies, how many will bake in total?” Connecting classroom concepts to real-life tasks helps learning stick and gives kids a concrete way to visualize math in action.
