Decorated Christmas Cookies

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I was inspired to bake some cookies. Not just any cookies.


Beautiful cookies. Decorated with royal icing. These are legit.

And the icing only require 4 ingredients (I added lemon extract, as well): powdered sugar, corn syrup, meringue powder, and water. I followed this recipe.

After sifting the powdered sugar....

You mix everything in a stand mixer (which I can do now!!). I forgot to take pictures of that. Whoops.

And I really thought I'd taken pictures of tinting the icing red and green and filling the piping bags. But I didn't! Oh well.

Moving on...outline your cookies with the royal icing (I used a #3 tip) and let that sit for at least 10 minutes so it could harden and create a space that I could fill with flood icing.

Create the flood icing by mixing water with the royal icing. I used another piping bag and filled it in with icing. I used a skewer to get it into the corners because I didn't have any toothpicks. I adore these snowflakes.

I did the same thing with these little trees.

The corn syrup in the icing makes them shiny!

Once the icing had mostly set up, I did something very sneaky.

I mixed together water and meringue powder to make a kind of glue, and I used a pastry brush to apply it to certain parts of the cookie. I put sprinkles all over it, and after I shook off the excess, which you can see at the end of the post. (Somehow my pictures got out of order!)

I did the same thing with the snowflakes - I love how they turned out!

I made dots on the ornaments, which I liked, but I'm not very good at outlining circles yet.

This one's just for you, Candice!! :-)

I found a girl cookie cutter, so I designed a few different outfits.

Here's the outcome of the "glue" on the tree cookies. :-)

This was my first time using piping bags and royal icing....you should try it!