It’s no secret that I love making Christmas cookies! Each year, I have such a fun time putting together different designs and sharing them with friends and family. This year, I felt drawn to bright Christmas colors and some of my tried and true repeats. I’m sharing them in the nick of time and hope you enjoy making them too!
You can also find the full video on YouTube, here.
Royal Icing Recipe and Icing Consistencies
You can find my favorite royal icing recipe here. The consistency of icing is key for easy decorating. Click here to see a YouTube video on finding the right icing thickness.
Complete Guide to Royal Icing PDF
You can also find my Complete Guide to Royal Icing Consistency here.
Piping Bags
In terms of piping bags, I mainly used tipless piping bags for very fine details and PME 1.5 piping tips for most piping, and larger piping tips such as 4 to 6 to flood larger surfaces.
Cookie Recipe
I used my classic sugar cookie recipe for these, which you can find here. If you’d like to try a different cookie base, other recipes can be found here.
Icing Consistency
All the icing consistencies are medium, unless mentioned otherwise. You can find my Complete Guide to Royal Icing Consistency here.
Cookie Decorating Basics
Here are some posts which take you through cookie decorating basics. If you’re a beginner, you can use these videos as a guide to basic decorating. I’ll mention details unique to each cookie in each cookie section below:
{Video} Cookie Decorating Tools & How to Fill a Piping Bag
{Video} How to Outline and Flood Cookies with Royal Icing
{Video} How to Dry Cookies Decorated with Royal Icing
Decorating Tools
What you’ll need (The Amazon links are affiliate links):
Red House Cookie
The design for the house came from this Christmas card I got last year from a friend:
I used my Pico Projector to trace the cookie design as I’m not the best at drawing. Here is a tutorial on using the mini projector. Here is another projector tutorial for the AAXA projector I also use.
Royal Icing Transfers
Flood work, also known as runouts, transfers, color flow (by Wilton), or run sugar, is basically the piping of a runny royal icing onto parchment paper or acetate paper into an outlined shape. When the shape dries, you have an icing design which you can use for a multitude of decorating purposes; on cakes, cookies, gingerbread houses, cupcakes etc. You can also pipe onto wires, toothpicks, skewers etc. so that your design can be ‘free-standing’.
If you’d like to try it, here are some tips as to how to do your own floodwork:
How to do royal icing floodwork:
- If you’re using a transparency, make sure you lightly smear it with shortening so your icing doesn’t stick.
- Make multiples of your decoration as flood work breaks easily.
- Let your first layer dry for 24 hours before you add more details.
- After your final details have been piped, again let your decorations dry for 24 hours. How long it takes to dry does depend on the size of the decoration and the amount of humidity in the air, however, I find 24 hours seems to be a safe time.
- Peel your dry royal icing runout gently away from its’ backing by using a metal spatula or palette knife or peel the parchment or transparency away from the design by putting it near the edge of the table and gently pulling the ‘paper’ away.
- Put a small dab of royal icing on the back of your flood work decoration and delicately place onto your desired surface.
Gingerbread Man Peekaboo Christmas Tree
For the gingerbread man peekaboo Christmas tree, I piped circle of brown icing onto a transparency sheet, let that completely dry, then piped the face details. You could make a mouth using a black food coloring pen.
Thank you to Shiori of Fiocco Cookies for the tree with gingerbread man cookie design inspiration! I love all her adorable designs. You can find her cutters at How Sweet is That? Thank you as well to Bon Farine for the adorable duffle coat cutter and design!
The little “water droplets” on the monogram cookies are made of isomalt powder. I made them when poured the windows for this gingerbread house. You can see how it’s done in the corresponding video.
Whether you make them this year or another, are sharing them with family, gifting to friends, or savoring some morsels with a hot chocolate, tea or coffee, I hope these sweet treats add a little more Christmas magic to your holiday season.
And that’s it! If you have any questions or comments please feel free to drop me a line below in the comment section or on social media. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and YouTube.
Merry Christmas!
xo,
Marian
p.s. Here come a zillion photos, as usual. 🙂
