Christmas Sweater Cookies

How adorable are these Christmas sweater cookies??

My sister and I have been decorating Christmas cookies for… oh, forever. We started when I was in high school, or maybe even middle school with my mom, and have continued the tradition since moving out. We also started decorating other sugar cookies for other events with specific themes, making a few designs and repeating them to make whole platters of decorated cookies. And yet somehow, it’s taken us this long to realize that our normal scheme of decorating each cookie as its own masterpiece is an insane time-suck.

But no more! This year we had a theme, and a plan. And what says Christmas more than Christmas sweaters? So all of our cookies are decorated Fair-Isle style for some kitschy, festive cuteness.

Here we have some snowflakes and snowmen. We kept the snowmen simple with scarves decorated to go with the larger sweater designs. I realized later that it could’ve been really cute to make the snowmen wearing sweaters, but I actually think it’s nice to have some simpler designs to go with the intricate ones.

Here are the trees and ornaments. 🙂

Since we knew there was going to be some intense piping work going on, we kept everything else as simple as possible.  We only used 4 shapes, 3 colors, and 2 icing consistencies. We used 20-second icing to flood the cookies, without piping anything for the base at all. Because we did that (and put a fan on the cookies) we were able to finish all of these in a day rather than having to wait overnight for the base icing to be dry enough to pipe on.

For the cookies with multiple colors on the base, we did non-touching colors first, let them dry with the fan for 20-30 minutes and then filled in the other colors so there wasn’t any color bleeding.

I love these ornaments. Particularly the reindeer ones.

But these trees are my favorite. I love they way they turned out.

Here they area all together. I think these are my favorite Christmas ones we’ve ever made. Will we be able to top these next year? I guess we have a year to come up with another design. Haha.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all my readers!