It’s a little late for holiday cookies by some standards, but yesterday is when I made this batch, and if you happen to have some time on your hands and enough flour and spices in your cupboard, you can totally knock these up this afternoon.

Leaving a little treat out for Santa Claus is something that we’ve not done for quite some time in this family, mostly because we, the children, are now 18 and 20. It would be somewhat inappropriate to let delicious biscuits go stale overnight in the name of a man we both (sadly) found out over a decade ago does not in fact sneak down the chimney to enjoy them.

If you are lucky enough to have tiny excited people running around your house right now in a fit of excitement for the arrival of the big guy in red, you may well be taking part in this cute tradition. I highly recommend these gingerbread cookies with a little Baileys icing.

This is not really a recipe post. I used the BBC Food gingerbread recipe (why mess around this close to Christmas, right?) and these amazing cookie cutters from Sainsbury’s that you really do need in your life, they just make for such impressive looking cookies, I think.

To ice them, I mixed a bit of icing sugar (don’t even try and tell me you weigh out your icing sugar, I simply won’t believe you) with some Baileys until it got the thickness I prefer to work with. I shovelled it into a sandwich bag, snipped the end off and piped nervously around the edges.

They look pretty great, if I may say so myself.

Are you making cookies for Santa this year? Do you have babies that still believe in him? Let me know!

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Baileys kitted me out with a bottle of the good stuff and a supermarket voucher to bring you this idea, thanks Baileys!