It’s that time of year again! Time to reveal our Christmas cookie design for the year. This year we’ve gone with a simple, elegant Christmas cookie design.
Simple Elegant Christmas Cookies
My sister recently had a baby (isn’t he so adorable??) so we wanted to keep the cookies a bit simpler this year.
We were inspired by this photo by Julie Moore, but simplified even more and added some different shapes.
Supplies:
These are the supplies that we use consistently every time we make decorated sugar cookies. Additionally, you will need cookie cutters.
Squeeze bottles
Decorating bags
Icing Tips
Scriber Needle Tool
As far as the recipes go, we used this maple nutmeg cookie recipe from Smitten Kitchen. And we always use this royal icing recipe from Bake at 350. We flavored it very lightly with orange extract, and it made for a really nice flavor profile for the finished cookie.
We primarily used this lovely moss green color and white icing, with accents of gold, brown, and maroon.
While I love our Rudolph cookies from last year, fewer colors is always easier!
We used two icing consistencies– 20-second icing, which is icing thinned out with water until a line drawn in the bowl of icing disappears in 20 seconds; and piping icing. We like to thin our piping icing just until it doesn’t hold stiff peaks.
We did piping consistency in each color, but only 20-second icing in the white and green.
The great thing about using 20-second icing as the background of the cookies is that it dries much faster. They don’t need to be 100% dry but need to be set before piping the details.
After the cookies had dried overnight, we used a food color marker
to add the eye on the reindeer. We also added some gold luster dust
to the reindeer’s antlers and also the “Noël” script.
To use the luster dust, mix it with a small amount of alcohol-based extract or plain vodka. Then paint it on with a food safe paintbrush
.
That’s it! What do you think of the simpler design this year?
