Christmas Cookie Decorating

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year! With the busyness of the Christmas season we've been away from the blog for too long and are excited to start 2016 with some new recipes and restaurant reviews.

Each Christmas, we look forward to baking our holiday favorites. While we enjoy making the traditional array of Christmas cookies and beautifully piped cupcakes, we are always most excited for our decorated sugar cookies. Over the years we have accumulated quite the collection of festive cutters from reindeer to snowflakes to this year's latest trendy addition— ugly sweaters. On top of our large cookie cutter collection, we really enjoy picking out holiday sprinkles to use as an artistic garnish. 

Chocolate Cupcakes with White Chocolate Peppermint Buttercream

While we feel confident in our cupcake decorating techniques, (and love to use liners and toppers from our favorite company, Meri Meri) sugar cookies always present new challenges— especially as we become more advanced. Here are some cookie decorating tips that we continue to use year after year. We hope they are helpful!

Our original ugly sweater cookies!

Cookie Decorating Tips:

1. Vibrant Colors
For vibrant frosting colors, it is best to use gel food coloring rather than liquid drops. Gel coloring also comes in a wider variety of colors— saving you from the guesswork of how many drops of yellow and blue make the perfect green.
2. Opaque Icing
To create a perfectly opaque icing that is great for layering, use a royal icing recipe with meringue powder.
3. Icing Consistency
The single most frustrating factor in decorating sugar cookies is creating the perfect icing consistency. While icing made with meringue powder may seem thick, it is better to start with thicker icing and slowly add water in small amounts to thin the icing. For best results, add in the color to the icing and fully incorporate before adding water if necessary.
4. Flooding
To ice the base of the cookie, place the icing in either a piping bag or clear condiment squeeze bottle. Check out our post on the flooding technique which saves time and creates the perfect frosted surface.
5. Finer Details
For finer details piped on top of the base layer, the tip of a clear condiment bottle may be too large. We recommend a Wilton #2 tip for these finer details.
6. Layering Frosting
If you are planning on layering frosting like we did for these sweater cookies, wait until the base layer is fairly dry before piping on additional details. As excited as you may be to decorate, adding another layer too early may cause the icing layers to bleed into each other.
7. Marbling
Don't be intimidated by the marbled cookie on the top right. To create this design, first pipe evenly spaced lines on top of your iced cookie. Next, run a toothpick through the lines (in the opposite direction) to create the marbled effect. For this cookie, I started with diagonal lines pointing to the right. I then ran the toothpick through these lines diagonally in the opposite direction.

We are excited for what 2016 may bring for the blog, and send our best wishes for the New Year!