The Gourmet Mama

I’ve always admired those gorgeous cookies on the covers of Women’s Day and Martha Stewart Living Magazine . . . so I decided to try making some this year. Making Christmas sugar cookies is a beautiful tradition that my mother started with me and I’m happy to carry on with my own kids. My mom even sent me the cookie cutters that we used when I was little, so they are being used by the third generation of little hands this year!

These cookies are super fast and easy to make, no chilling time needed. You can decorate these tasty cookies with buttercream frosting, piping gel or, like I did, with royal icing and the flooding technique. But first the recipe, which you might recognize from this post.

Christmas Sugar Cookies

makes 3 dozen

4 c. flour
1.5 c. sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
2 eggs
3/4 c. butter, melted
2 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350°.

Cream sugar and eggs together with vanilla. Pour in butter while stirring.

Beat in flour and baking powder. Roll out on a floured surface to 1/4? thickness.

Cut out your cookies and bake on an ungreased baking sheet for 12 min. or until golden brown. Let cool before you ice.

Royal Icing

Makes approx. 2 cups

2 egg whites
2 Tblsp. water (if cooking)
2-3 c. icing sugar, sifted

In the top of a double boiler, mix water, egg whites and 6 Tblsp. of sugar. Beat on the low setting of your hand mixer as you heat it. The egg whites need to hit 160° to be safe, so you will need a candy thermometer. The beating will foam everything up, that’s totally normal.

Once the mixture reaches 160°, you can remove the icing from the stove and beat in the remaining sugar until the icing is thick enough to pipe.

Divide your icing into as many small bowls as you want colors. Add food coloring (I find these gel colors work best) and mix well.

Now, place a spoonful of icing into a Ziplock or sandwich bag and snip off the end to create a tiny hole. You need to pipe around the edge of each cookie, like so. (please excuse the botched star point, a tiny someone was trying to pinch the cookie while I worked!)

You’ll need to do this with all the cookies, using the appropriate colors. I suggest covering the icing bowls while you work, since the icing tends to set up fast.

For more elaborate cookies, you may need to outline different areas in different colors.

Next, add a little water to each icing color in the bowls and stir thoroughly. You want the icing to run just a little, but not too much. It should be the consistency of honey for this step, which is called “flooding”.

Drop some icing onto your cookie.

Now, spread the icing right to the piped edges (which will by hard by now) with a toothpick until smooth. If the icing stays in peaks or holds toothpick marks, it’s too dry and needs a little more water.

The end result should be smooth and clean, like this.

Of course, there’s no need to stick to single colors. While you can pipe in details ahead of time, it can be difficult to spread the icing around them. I found it worked better to drop the runnier icing onto the cookie once I had finished flooding it.

Here’s an example. . . the red streamers were piped ahead of time and the yellow dots were added while the icing was wet. You could also pipe additional details once the cookie has dried overnight.

For more interesting details, try using the toothpick dipped in another color to draw in the icing.

Or, stream lines of another color (or two or three) across the iced cookie, while the icing is still wet, then cut through it with your toothpick for a psychedelic look . . . like this Easter bunny that somehow snuck into our batch of Christmas cookies!

Tip: If you are doing something more complicated, like the train in the very first photo, don’t do what I did and pipe icing of different colors for each section. It creates a gap between the two colors. Instead, pipe in one color, then have the other color join it, but never pipe two lines side by side.

Enjoy! These cookies need to harden for a few hours, then you can pack them on top of each other and give them away . . . if they survive that long!

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