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

1. Pipe small rectangles so it alternates the coloring of the flooded icing.
2. Pipe small lines so it alternates the coloring of the flooded icing.
3. Pipe small lines and add tiny branches to the lines. Add sprinkles.
4. Pipe small dots making it polka dotted. Add sprinkles.

To make heart shaped shortbread cookies, first make your shortbread cookie dough and get ready to roll it out.

Grab your favorite heart shaped cookie cutters.

Wilton’s heart shaped cookie cutter is a decent size, giving you a 3 ” heart shaped biscuit.

Should you chill shortbread dough before baking?

Typically it’s best to place shortbread cookie dough in the fridge for 30 min before rolling it out. The fridge solidifies the ingredients together so it makes it much easier to roll out the dough this way.

How to Make Heart Shaped Shortbread Cookies

1. Roll out your shortbread cookie dough until it’s about 1/4″ in thickness.
2. Place your favorite heart shaped cookie cutter on your dough so it has good margins around the cookie cutter.
3. Gently press the cookie cutter into the dough until it’s full cut through and you feel the resistance of the table.
4. Remove the heart shaped cookie cutter from the shortbread dough vertically.
5. Continue cutting your cookie dough until all the cookie dough has been cut.
6. Transfer the shortbread cookie dough to a baking pan.
7. Using a fork, gently poke holes in the shortbread dough.
8. Reroll the dough and use your cookie cutters to cut more cookies.
9. Bake the cookies for the required time.
10. Let the cookies cool on a cooling rack.
11. Cookies are best within 2-3 weeks after baking and should be stored at room temperature in an airtight container.

Why do you poke holes in shortbread?

You need to poke holes in shortbread dough prior to baking to let the steam out of the cookies while it bakes. This makes the cookies bake evenly, without letting it brown on the edges.

What happens if you put too much butter in shortbread?

If you put too much butter in your shortbread, the butter will seep out of the cookie and spread the cookie dough out all over the baking pan in the oven. They will be very difficult to get off of the pan.

Why do my shortbread cookies fall apart?

Shortbread cookies will fall apart if their isn’t enough fat to keep them together, or if the dough is too warm. If your dough is a bit crumbly only, you may just need to chill the dough for 30 min before rolling it out. Be patient when working with shortbread dough, as it does take a little bit to roll it out evenly. Alternatively, you can add 1 tbsp more butter at a time to your dough to have it come together to roll out.

Wilton’s heart cookie cutter can also be used as a love heart cookie cutter for valentines day.

You can decorate your love heart cookies many ways by adding royal icing to the top of them.

There are countless ways to decorate heart shaped cookies!

Use your imagination to come up with color combinations and use your piping tips to try out different shapes on your cookies.

If you don’t want to commit to piping on your cookie, you can always try piping first on parchment paper.

Beginners can learn step by step on how to decorate sugar cookies with royal icing if this is your first time using it.

Royal icing is preferred when decorating cookies because they will dry fully and become stackable.

If you decide to use buttercream icing place the cookies side by side so they will not smudge your freshly piped buttercream icing.

You can decorate heart shaped cookies with almost any cookie recipe.

We recommend using sugar cookies to decorate on because they cut easily with cookie cutters, and usually turn out well.

After your cookies have been cookie cut by your favorite heart shaped cookie cutter, bake them for the required time according to your recipe. Let the cookies cool on a cooling rack for about 20 minutes.

Once your cookies are fully cooled, you can flood them with royal icing.

At this point you can add a few sprinkles all over the heart shaped cookie and you can be finished decorating it.

Or if you want more decorations, let the cookies fully dry overnight or about 8 hours.

Separate your icings and colors and you’re ready to pipe more decorations on them.

You can put a rose or flower off to the side of the heart cookie. Add a couple of leaves to the flower. Then you’re ready to pipe writing onto your heart shaped cookie to personize it or give it a theme.

For this heart shaped decorated cookie, we had the idea of putting some ruffled edging around the cookie.

We love the contrasting color combination. Add your personized message of theme of your cookies to the center of the heart shaped cookie.

For this cookie, we used only white icing, and put a writing on the center of the cookie, as well as a bit of decoration on the edge of the heart cookie.

Heart shaped cookies can be decorated with a few sprinkles. You can use melted chocolate as the ”glue” to hold the sprinkles onto the cookie.

Another option is to use sprinkles on top of cookies right after they come out of the oven. You can do this with sugar cookies or shortbread cookies.

For macarons, you can put a couple of sprinkles on the cookie as soon as you’ve piped the batter and are letting them dry before placing them in the oven to bake.

Don’t overdo it though, only put a couple of sprinkles on macarons. As well, only put small, tiny sprinkles on macarons, as the bigger ones will ruin the macaron when it bakes.

You can pipe melted chocolate and caramel sauce in the corner of a heart shaped cookie as a intricate decoration. You can add a couple of sprinkles as well if desired.