Making beautiful Christmas cookies starts with baking your favorite sugar cookie recipe.
Sugar cookies can be decorated many ways to create beautiful Christmas cookies for your friends and family.
Sugar cookies will stay good for up to 2 weeks at room temperature, or you can freeze them for up to 1 month.
This makes giving sugar cookies as gifts very easy! They store for a long time, and they are a sentimental, thoughtful, and homemade Christmas gift you can easily make.
Baking sugar cookies is easy and not time consuming. However, decorating sugar cookies is very time consuming depending on how detailed you want your cookies.
An easy cookie decorating idea for your sugar cookies, is flooding your sugar cookies and then putting a few sprinkles on top for an added shimmer. Learn how to flood your sugar cookies and add sprinkles to the top of them with our step by step guide.
Once your sugar cookies are baked and cooled, you can make royal icing for piping onto your sugar cookies.
First, make your icing and then use a bit of water to thin out the icing for flooding. Flood your cookies with the background color you want to show. Using a lighter color for your icing is desired because then the background color is less likely to bleed into the top colors you add.
Let the cookie dry overnight or for a couple of hours until it’s dry to the touch.
Mix your icing again and color it with a few drops of liquid food coloring. You’ll have to separate the icing into different bowls to color them accordingly.
Add a bit of icing sugar to the bowls if the icing is too thin to pipe. You want the icing to flow, but not be too thin or it will spread all over your cookie. Try to make it a “toffee” consistency.
Sugar Cookie Designs for Christmas
To make beautiful Christmas cookies, here are a few designs you can try out:
How to make a snowflake on a Christmas cookie
To make this snowflake cookie, start the top design by making the lines crisscross. Then add the diagonal lines. Snowflakes need a lot of room for the branches, so try to make the lines as big as possible.
Add in the tiny branches, starting at the end of the line. Add them alternately so you’ll be sure you can get the matching branch in without touching the sides of the other large lines.
Top your snowflake cookie with a few clear sprinkles for a shiny effect.
How to make a rose on a Christmas Cookie
To make the cookie on the bottom of the above photo, we’ll make the snowflake the same way. This time, we’ll get a new piping bag with the star tip to make a little rose for the cookie.
Start the rose by squeezing the piping bag a little bit for the center of the rose. Stream the icing out of the bag and turn the bag to make a complete circle around the rose. Finish it off by gently pushing the icing into the rose and then remove the piping bag.
How to make a Christmas Ornament on a Christmas Cookie
Pipe the icing using grey, white, or black icing for the Christmas ornament.
Pipe a small circle at the edge of the cookie. This will be the hook of the Christmas ornament.
Pipe a rectangle underneath the circle having it touch the circle. This is the metal part of the Christmas ornament. Pipe a couple of lines vertically in the rectangle.
Pipe a large circle edging it as close to the edge of the flooded icing as possible. This will be the Christmas ornament.
Pipe a couple of lines in the center of the bulb for a bit of decoration. Make the lines from point to point on the ornament. This will create a weaving effect, making the ornament look 3D. Add a couple of sprinkles in the center of the ornament for more of a color pop.
5 Ways to Decorate a Candy Cane Cookie
- Pipe small rectangles so it alternates the coloring of the flooded icing.
- Pipe small lines so it alternates the coloring of the flooded icing.
- Pipe small lines and add tiny branches to the lines. Add sprinkles.
- Pipe small dots making it polka dotted. Add sprinkles.
