Christmas Tree Cookie Cake

Gingerbread cake with brown butter cream cheese frosting and butter cookies

I wasn’t originally planning to write a recipe for this, but as soon as I saw how great the finished product looked, I was compelled to share it. When I sliced open the cake and tasted how delicious it was, I knew I had to. This was inspired by a strawberry-coated tree cake I made a few years ago, but here I use piped butter cookies from the recipe I sent out last week. It’s not only much easier to attach butter cookies than strawberries, but I was shocked by how neat it looked (considering neat cakes are not my forte).

This starts with gingerbread cake layered with brown butter cream cheese frosting (delicious), and then the whole thing is coated with lots of little piped butter cookies (amplifying deliciousness). The cake is soft and spiced, the frosting rich, tangy, and sweet, and the cookies are buttery and crumbly. Truthfully, this cake is a pain to cut, and I think there are admittedly too many cookies in the cookie:cake ratio (seemingly impossible to fix and still get the same aesthetic effect), but my neighbor, whom I shared this with, loved having extra cookies as a treat after the cake was finished.

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I will be serving this gingerbread cake at my bake sale raising funds for Project EATS on December 13th at Derby Cup Coffee! It will be topped with my piped butter cookies, but I still haven’t decided on the frosting – help me out in the comments and let me know what you think would taste good. RSVP below. I hope to see you there!

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I’m keeping this intro short as I think the photos speak for themself here. Enjoy!