Get my tips on how to decorate your cookies easily and stress-free. No special skills required!
Have you ever been in this situation? Your kids pick out fun cookie cutters, you bake up some delicious sugar cookies, but then you have no clue how to decorate them. Ahh!
If like me, you’re not particularly artistic, and NOT a cookie-decorating aficionado, I have a few tricks, especially when it comes to royal icing, that will make your cut-out cookies look more professional with minimal effort.
What Do I Need?
Well, first off you’re going to need some cookies to decorate! I suggest my sugar cookie recipe, which I created specifically to not spread out so that the cookie cutter shapes are maintained. You could also use these tips for other cookies that are rolled out and cut, like gingerbread.
You’ll also need some royal icing, which can be divided up to be tinted with different colors of food coloring.
Other than that, there’s some tools that can be helpful like pastry bags and piping tips which are shared below. You could use zip-top bags with a piping tip instead, but I find pastry bags easier to handle.
Cookie Decorating Tips
Instead of intricately decorating the cookies with layers of detail, flood the cookies with large blocks of color. Then, using a wet-on-wet technique where you add another color of icing on top of the flood before it dries, you can easily create unique patterns that look professional.
Try adding large and small dots for polka-dot cookies. Or, swirl a toothpick into the dots to make tie-dyed cookies. Stripes and plaids are fun to make, too, because the wet icing self-levels and softens the edges of the lines. Zig zags, squiggles, and blocks of color are also a fun way to decorate.
In addition to adding more color onto the flooding, the wet icing is the perfect glue for things like sprinkles, and other colorful sugar decorations available in the decorating aisle at the grocery store. These can often hide any imperfections if you don’t have a steady hand.
I can’t wait to see all the amazing ways you decorate your cookies, so please tag @cookthestory on social media. And if you have any tips that have helped you, please share with us!
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