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Post 10 of 12 in my 12 Days of Christmas Recipes Series – Christmas Sugar Cookies

I know that I have posted a recipe for sugar cookies before, but that was forever ago. A lifetime. Back when this blog was a “youngin.” A whole 5 months ago! *sniffs* Seems like just yesterday…

Anyway, I’ve been excited to make these cookies for several weeks, ever since I got my nifty Kuhn Rikon squeeze bottle cookie decorating set. Which was a Godsend. More on that later.

My sugar cookie recipe can be found here.

This picture pretty sums up why I love holiday baking.

I ended up making quite a variety of shapes, which later turned out to be lots of work decorating (with having to make several batches of colored frosting). Oh, well. I regret nothing!

I iced the cookies using royal icing flavored with a teensy bit of orange and vanilla extract and lemon juice. You can find my recipe for royal icing here.

I made a special trip to our local craft store to buy some new icing colors for these cookies. Look! Christmas Red!

This is the Kuhn Rikon squeeze bottle cookie decorating set I mentioned earlier.

I had previously done some research on a better solution for piping icing, because I find regular piping bags unwieldy (probably due to my lack of experience) and wasteful. I found this set on Amazon, and lo and behold, the next day I was lucky enough to find a set at Marshall’s for $15 (I squee’d in the store when I found it).

Oh, sprinkles. You make the world go ’round.

This is the icing I used for piping the green outline onto the Christmas tree cookies, just to give you an idea of the consistency you want for piping. It’s just about the consistency of toothpaste. You’ll want to thin it down some for the flood icing (photos coming up).

I’m bad at piping. Trust me. But these bottles make it so easy! Can’t stop raving.

I also used the same green piping icing to add bowties and a button to the “gingerbread” men. 😛

After I was finished piping all the green icing, I squeezed the remaining icing back into a bowl and added about half of a teaspoon of water to thin it enough for flooding the cookies.

Squeeze the flood icing liberally onto the cookie.

Using a toothpick or wooden skewer, spread out the flood icing into all the nooks and crannies. At this point you can add some dots of red icing for ornaments if you wish, and the will flatten with the flood icing. Sprinkles should be added at this point as well.

Side note though – my experiment of using gel icing for ornaments was a failure. That cookie had to be sacrificed.

Here’s a shot of all the cookies I decorated.

The snowflakes were my favorites! It’s all about the silver dragees – bling, I mean.

Check out the other posts in my 12 Days of Christmas Recipes series!

Day 1: Chocolate-Covered Cherry Cookies

Day 2: Cinnamon Palmiers

Day 3: Cranberry Relish

Day 4: Chewy Spicy Ginger Cookies

Day 5: Chocolate Mint Chip Cookies

Day 6: Goat Cheese-Stuffed Dates Wrapped with Prosciutto

Day 7: Almond Orange Biscotti

Day 8: Chocolate Crinkle Cookies

Day 9: Candied Walnuts

Day 10: Christmas Sugar Cookies