Nothing says Christmas like decorated sugar cookies. I made a huge batch of sugar cookie dough and let it chill overnight before rolling it out. The day that I baked them off, I made my royal icing. In retrospect, I would recommend spreading it out even more- for instance, make your dough one day, bake the cookies the next, and decorate them the third day, but I made a lot of cookies and only had a little help decorating. If you have more helpers and less cookies, maybe you can squeeze it all into one day.
What is so nice about Royal Icing is that you can make all sorts of cute designs, and then the icing will harden so that you can bag them or stack them. Some other tips: disposable piping bags, gel food coloring, and stacking cooling racks.
The usual method for Royal Icing is to pipe your outline using a thicker, toothpaste consistency, then flood with a thinner consistency. After you've flooded, wait an hour or so to pipe additional designs on top. If you want to use more than one or two colors, you will need lots of piping bags and couplets. I had to run out last minute to buy more couplets. Additional tips would be helpful too, but you can always swap the same one out (being sure to wash between colors).
I've decided not to do too much of a tutorial on this because it is so complicated- and others already have done great ones! However, here are links to the websites with the recipes I used (
Sugar Cookies and
Royal Icing).
Pioneer Woman also has a great tutorial with lots of pictures. I will say that although this was a big challenge, I'm pleased with the results of my first try. The cookies looked and tasted great- and my family gobbled them up!
