Making a Tesselating Gingerbread Man Cookie Cutter

If there's one thing I like about the holiday season it's the gingerbread cookies. Make them in advance to let the spice flavour infuse and they get incredibly delicious. The thing is that in large family gatherings extremely yummy treats tend to disappear into thin air. So making large batches becomes a matter of necessity.

Now here's where the problem starts. Because although the gingerbread man is arguably one of the most traditional shapes for christmas cookies it is also the one that usually takes more work. The arms and the legs of the cookie shape make it really hard to cut them close to each other, and a fair bit of dough remains in the gaps between the cookies. This forces you to reroll the dough using the scraps time and time again until all of the dough has been used up.

So making a huge army of gingerbread men would seem like quite an impossible task. Or is it?

In comes a tesselating cookie cutter to the rescue!

For those who don't know what a tesselating pattern is one where the one or a set of shapes can be repeated to fill a surface with no overlaps and leaving no gaps in between.

This started a little while ago when I saw an image of a decorating pattern made out of tiles shaped like a little man or priest with a pointy hat. The moment I saw the way the alternating positions allowed them to tesselate I instantly thought that the same concept could be applied to a gingerbread man cookie cutter, the only challenge was how to adjust the pattern to capture the essence of the gingerbread man without losing the tesselating capacity.

This is the journey I took to create that pattern, make it into a cookie cutter and finally into an army of delicious gingerbread cookies.

Now if you just want to make the cookie cutter you just need access to a 3D printer. You can then use one of the included files to print your own tesselating cookie cutter and you are good to go. However, If you also want to put it to good use there's a bonus section with a recipe for some amazing gingerbread cookies.

So if you also want to make a batch of them here´s what you are gonna need:

1. 150g of butter (room temperature).
2. 100g of dark brown sugar.
3. 275g of flour.
4. 1 egg.
5. 1 1/2 teaspoons of powdered ginger.
6. 1 teaspoon of zinnamon.
7. 1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg.
8. 1/3 teaspoon of ground cloves.
9. 1/2 tablespoon of honey.

Now lets take a step back fom the whole baking aspect for a while and lets focus on how the pattern came to be.

First I began by making a crude sketch of the cookie shape. Dimensions are not relevant in these stage. As long as the overall proportions are ok then it can be scaled up later on. The key thing is to make it very simple and with as few lines as possible so as to get an idea of which part of the pattern correlates with each other.

In this case the top of the head makes the space between the legs, the arms make the base of the feet and the neck, and the sides of the body/legs correlates with itsef flipped upside down.

By identifying which lines are in contact with each other and having them as distinct and separate entities its easier to visualize whether it will tesselate and then how it can be altered while keeping this property intact.

Now comes the more technical aspect of the design process. The previous step could have been accomplished by any vector illustration software, but to take this to the next level we are gonna use the parametric sketch tools that come with CAD software to help us preserve the tesselating property throughout the editing process.

I personally use Solidworks, but this are basic sketch tools that come with any CAD software.

How do we implement this?

Well this is where making the repeating sections of the pattern into distinct entities comes in handy. Knowing that they must be equal we can then use geometric relations to ensure they have the same lenghth and that they stay aligned with each other.

To do this you can add a ¨vertical¨ relation to points that correlate between different parts of the cookie. This is like the equivalent of movieng the cookie cutter upwards in a straight line to cut the next cookie. Next you can give them the ¨equal lenghth¨ and ¨paralel¨ relation so that they will match up no matter what changes you make to the shape of the cookie.

I also created an additional constructive line which I anchored on its mid point to the model origin (the 0,0,0 coordinates). It serves as a point of reference for the other relations and as a centre for the mirrored sections of the cookie. The center of the arc that makes the top of the head is also vertically aligned with this point.

Having this relations makes it easy to define the shape with very few measurements, and sets the stage to the next part of the design process.

Once you have added the relations you can copy the resulting shape a couple of times to verify that the pattern tesselates properly.

Doing this in solidworks is fairly easy. You just select the lines that make up the contour of the cookie, select the option to create a block and pick an insertion point to guide the alignment when pasting it.

Then you can add acouple of extra Gingerbread men to the sketch and simply check if you can make the edges match leaving no room in between. To do this you just select the two edges and add a coincident/corradial relation to bring them together.

The best thing about doing it this way is that you can edit the initial block and the pattern will update by itself.

Now that we have a basic design and that we have also established it can successfully tesselate we can start to play around with the shape to make it look nicer and more friendly.

You can do that using some state-of-the-art graphic design software, oooor you can do the way I did it and just use paint. Although you will have to return to a more sophisticated program to formalize the design, you can use the brush tools to quickly test many variables of the design and pick which direction you would like the pattern to take.

There's one thing to keep in mind though when editing: when you move or add material in any direction, this must affect the complementarý section of the model to compensate, or the no longer will tesselate.

You can see this in one of the pictures, where I tried to give the Gingerbread men a belly but realized that that would require me to also give them chicken legs.

I settled with rounding down some of the sharpest corners in the ¨hands¨, having them raise their arms ever so slightly and accentuating the legs and the hips to create a break in the body.

When you have a general idea of the changes of the changes you wanna make to the pattern you can go back to your CAD or graphic design software and make precise adjustments.

This is how I made each of them:

1. Rounding up the hands: Notice that I didnt do the same with the feet, this is because that would affect the profile of the neck and it would have been bad for the overall look. But in the case of the hands all I needed to do was round up the base of the neck simultaneously and it was done, keeping the tesselating property intact.
2. Raising up the hands: Here I had to alter the base of the feet to match the new angle of the arms.
3. Accentuating the legs: This one was the trickiest one to achieve. To preserve the tesselating pattern when diverging from a straight line some auxiliary geometry was needed. The key was that the new hip profile would do its thing until it reached the midpoint of the previous line and then it would invert and repeat itself on the other side to make up the legs. To do this I created a constructive line perpendicular to the midpoint and mirrored the same path twice to create the inverted version. This way I could play around with the hips and the legs would update immediately. I twweaked them until I reached a combination that I liked. And the Gingerbread Man tesselating pattern was complete.

I am going to explain two ways to make the cookie cutter. This one is the quickest, but it isn't as remix friendly. If you want to make a cookie cutter with just the contour this is the easiest way. But if you would like to add some details to the inside of the cookie, like draw it a face or some clothes the next option is the way to go.

For this option you are gonna need a sketch with the tesselating pattern. Then you use it for an extruded feature, but instead of selecting regions for the operation we use the contour path and select the ¨thin feature¨ box. This will offset the sketch and give thickness to the pattern. You want the mid plane type, to make the offset equal on both sides so it doesn't alter the tesselation and 0.8mm-1.2mm thickness depending on the size of the cookie.

As for the depth, give it around 14mm to accomodate for the grip clearance and the reinforcements.

Next come the reinforcements, as the thin walls of the cutter would make it too flimsy to handle. Create a new sketch using the outline of the cutter, add an offset and extrude it 4 mm. This will make it a lot more rigid and easier to handle.

For the next option we are gonna need to export the pattern to be able to edit it in another program.

In solidworks it isn't very straightforward, at least on version but here's how you do it: create a drawing, copy and paste the pattern contour from the model sketch and then save the file as a .ai or any other format of your choosing.

Now you can edit the pattern with any graphic design software of your choosing.

For this other options I used Adobe Illustrator to edit the pattern that we got from the previous step.

The first thing you wanna do is to delete any unnecessary lines and repeated parts of the pattern (the lines shared by two gingerbread men).

Then you duplicate the whole thing to create two superimposed versions. The easiest way to handle them is to give them a different colour and separate them into layers. They represent different extruding features for when we take it to 3D, so if you wanna add a face or some clothes you can create an additional layer.

Next you want to add some thickness to the path. Something like 0.8mm for the cutting part and 4mm for the reinforcement will do.

Then you will want to turn that path into a shape by using the outline stroke tool. You can see where to find it in the pictures. This will give us the regions we need to extrude into a 3D shape.

But there is just one more detail before we are done, to simplify those regions and make it easy to operate its best to combine them. To to this go to Window>>Pathfinder to open the tool panel, select all the the shapes from the previous operations and click unite to combine them into a single shape.

Now we can use the generated shapes to once again extrude them into a 3D cookie cutter.

You can do this using the CAD software of your choosing. You just need to export those shapes into a compatible format. With .DXF you use Solidworks to make the extrusions or you can export as an .SVG and edit them online using Tinkercad.

If you know your way around a slicer for 3d printing you could probably make it there and send it straight to printing!

In this case I'm gonna show you how to do it in SolidWorks, but I will include the pattern in both of the formats so you can use any software you like to make your own.

To Import the shapes you select a plane for the sketch and go to Insert<<DXF/DWG. It will open a menu. Choose to import them as a sketch, pick the import unit as milimiters and select which layer you want to import.

Repeat this with each layer and then extrude the individual sketches to their designeted depth, like we did the previous time.

Then Save your model and export it as .STL, now you are ready to print your very own tesselating gingerbread man cookie cutter!

Once you have the STL files you can 3D print the cookie cutter in any FDM printer.

If you want to print your own here are the .STL and .3MF files! The .3MF also has the printing presets built in, but you can change them manually otherwise. I suggest printing them with PETG with 6 perimeter walls instead of the standard 2. This takes advantage of the uniform thickness of the model walls and makes the reinforcements solid with no internal gaps.

The print takes about one hour and twenty minutes and uses 22 grams of filament.

Feel free to print your own, remix and share the model, but please don't use this free design for commercial uses. Thank you!

Now that you have your gorgeous tesselating cookie cutter why not put it to good use?

Here's a recipe for some delicious ginger cookies. It doesn't use molasses which I personally find to be a bit overpowering, but it uses brown sugar, so it still has that richness while allowing the rest of the spices to shine through. ou can keep the base and alter the spices to your liking. My sister outright doubles the amount of ginger for an extra sharp taste.

So if you also want to make a batch the size of what you'll see in the pictures here´s what you are gonna need:

1. 150g of butter (room temperature).
2. 100g of dark brown sugar.
3. 275g of flour.
4. 1 egg.
5. 1 1/2 teaspoons of powdered ginger.
6. 1 teaspoon of zinnamon.
7. 1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg.
8. 1/3 teaspoon of ground cloves.
9. 1/2 tablespoon of honey.

In this case you don´t need to start preheating the oven right away, as the cookie dough needs to be chilled before rolling.

What you will need to do in terms of preparations is taking the butter out of the fridge beforehand and give it some time to warm up to room temperature.

To begin making the dough you need to mix together the butter and the sugar. I like to add the spices at this stage because lots of spices are liposoluble and integrating them to the butter helps to release their flavours.

This stage is key for the texture of the dough as it reduces the size of the sugar crystals and adds air to the mix.

At the beginning it sort of looks like an Oreo ice-cream, but as times goes on you will stop seeing the grains of sugar, and the dough will get a smooth uniform tone.

You can definetely make the mixture by hand, but keep in mind that is very unlikely that you'll get those sugar grains to fully integrate. Focus on mixing it until the ingredient blend and the colour starts to become more smooth.

Once the sugar has blended into the butter it's time to add the rest of the ingredients.

I like to mix in the honey first, then about half of the flour, then the egg and end it with the rest of the flour.

Before mixing them in though, make sure to sift the flour if you can. It will make it easier to incorporate and avoid clumps.

I like adding the flour in stages with the egg in between to keep the mixture from getting too dry or too liquid during the process.

You'll notice that everything has mixed together nicely when the dough starts sepparating from the bow by itself.

Set the dough apart and chill in the fridge for 1-2 hours at least before baking.

Now it's time to preheat that oven to 180C / 350F to get it ready for those cookies.

Put some flour on some baking trays and get the chilled dough from the fridge.

Next you'll want that dough rolled to a uniform thicknes of around 3-5mm. Thinner cookies will get crispier, thicker cookies will have more of a chew to them. I find that when the dough is roughly half an inch thick, before doing the final stretching it's best to put some flour on the top, flip it, and then add some more flour. This prevents the dough from sticking too much to the working surface.

Once the dough is rolled out, get some flour on the cookie cutter so it doesn't stick and proceed to cut out the gingerbread men army. Just press the cookie cutter into the dough, extract it,reposition it so that the edges align with the previous cut ad press it down again. Repeat until the whole surface has been cut and place the cookies in the prepared cooking trays.

Bunch the scraps into a ball and roll it out again. If you feel that the dough has warmed up too much and is no longer firm you can chill it in the frige for a bit before rerolling it. Otherwise keep rolling out the dough, cutting out the cookies and placing them into trays. This doesn´t take as much as with other cookie cutters because the scrap is greatly reduced, but you still have to reroll a few times until you reach the ¨ball of shame¨ state. This happens when either your patience or your dough run thin, and you decide to just roll out the remaining dough into one giant round cookie.

Place your cookie trays into the preheated oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. The timing can vary a lot depending on the temperature of your oven so trust your nose and check the oven when you start smelling those toasty notes. When they start browning at the bottom it´s time to remove them from the oven.

Ideally they would also have started to darken in color at the top as well, but if the cookies are on the thick side and/or your oven is quite hot this won´t actually happen before the bottom starts burning. So guide yourself by the bottom colour, and if you feel like the bottom is toasting too fast before the rest of the cookie gets fully cooked just lower the temperature of your oven a little.

As the cookies start leaving the oven you can let them cool for a while to let them firm up before neatly transfering them into a storage container.

Gingerbread cookies get much better if you let the flavours set in for a couple of days, so if you can resist the the temptation to eat them all it's a good idea to make them in advance.

Kept in an airtight container they keep at room temperature for 2-3 weeks, inside the fridge for about 3-4 weeks or they can be frozen for up to 6 months.

Take your cohort of gingerbread men and invade your next friends or family reunion with pure christmas flavour!

Thanks for reading this Instructable!