Few activities are as cozy as gathering with friends and family to decorate cookies. While cookie decorating is a fun activity for any occasion, it’s usually the holidays that offer enough time away from school, work, and daily life to actually engage in cookie art.
The great thing about decorating cookies is that it’s a blast for any age group, from kindergartners to great-grandparents. To help you and whoever you’re decorating with this year, we’ve collected a few cookie decorating hacks.
(Its_krtzr / pixabay)
Use the Right Cookie
The right cookie depends on what your final product will be. Are you making something structural like a gingerbread house? Then you’ll need a sturdy, relatively thick cookie. Are you using the cookies as a canvas to paint with frosting? Then a cookie with a flatter, more uniform surface will be best. Soft, craggy cookies with an uneven surface may taste delicious but are a better choice for eating plain than for decorating. Some of our favorite comfort cookies to decorate are sugar cookies, spice cookies, and the well-loved peanut butter cookies. These all have enough structural integrity and plain surfacing to make them a versatile base for decoration.
Frosting doesn’t have to be bland
Most people like to make basic frosting or icing for their decorations, especially when they’re decorating with kids. While there’s nothing wrong with a simple royal icing, we think there are more interesting possibilities. Flavoring our icing bags with things like vanilla, lemon, mint, or even rose and root beer can turn decorating from a merely visual exercise into a multisensory experience. Not only do we get to enjoy flavors that are slightly more complex than pure sugar, but young people can also experiment with mixing and matching flavors on a cookie. What tastes better, root beer and vanilla or lemon and mint? You be the judge.
Simple recipes will give you the most variety
While a chocolate, macadamia and pecan, butterscotch cookie with a caramel buttercream frosting and sprinkles that look like the initials in your name sounds super cool, it also sounds like a complete pain to make. There’s also a good chance that other people don’t want to eat it! If you’re getting a crowd together to decorate cookies as an activity, using simple recipes that you can tweak slightly will allow you to provide lots of options with minimal hassle. For example, you can make a large amount of frosting or icing in a single batch, then divide it into smaller batches of different flavors or colors. Similarly, basic cookies can be tweaked with slightly different flavors, colors, or toppings to allow everyone some agency over their final product.
Brush up on the basics
If you or the people decorating with you aren’t experienced bakers, learning some of the basic techniques of decorating can improve your skills by miles. Even just learning how to pipe icing as an outline, then flooding the outline will make your decorations look much more recognizable. Other techniques include flocking, using toothpicks to create patterns or marbling, or working in layers to build up patterns and textures. Learning the basics and practicing together is a fun way to spend an evening and learn a skill that will serve you for the rest of your life.
Learn to use patterns
Let’s say you have mastered the basics, pulled countless varieties of delicious baked goods from the oven, and you’re ready to craft six dozen perfectly identical cookies to distribute in Christmas care packages to friends and neighbors. You make one cookie that looks fine, but each cookie you make after seems slightly different. Soon all of your cookies are a mismatched, ragged bunch that, in spite of your prowess in the kitchen, looks “homemade.” The key to creating a batch of perfectly decorated cookies is to forget about your freehand technique and learn to make and use patterns.
One method is to perform each step on every cookie at once. For example, if you want to give your gingerbread man eyes, give each gingerbread man eyes at the same time. Focusing on one task allows you to pay better attention to detail than making a whole man from scratch, then making another one. It also allows you to develop slight muscle memory, as you add eyes in the same place on each man across several dozen cookies. This assembly-line approach not only produces better results but is often quicker as well.
Another way to ensure consistency is to use stencils, rulers, and similar tools that can guide your work. With a sharp knife and some cardstock or parchment paper, you can make a stencil that’s limited only by your imagination. When combined with edible paint or edible markers, you can start decorating with incredibly fine precision. Even with a piping bag and some royal icing, using stencils to guide your piping can give your treats a neater presentation.
Regardless of your skill level, remember that decorating cookies is meant to be fun. If you’re a home baker, then your treats are going to be enjoyed for the sentiments they come with, rather than for the exquisite precision of your designs. No matter the occasion or how skilled your decorating is, we think fresh cookies are something to be celebrated. And if you want cookies as decorating canvases but don’t have time to make them, order cookies to be shipped to your door. Or send a cookie gift box to a loved one living far away and decorate together online. It’s a great way to flex your creativity while strengthening a relationship at the same time.
Video
