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When I was a child, my mother made sugar cookies for the holidays. Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and many more. We frosted them and sprinkled them with decorations in different colors. We looked forward to it every year, the bright cookies and that chance to be creative with different colors. It was a happy time.
This is even more fun. So fun that even adults get hooked. We’ve taught people how to do this in classes and have seen incredible, delicate scenes painted on cookies. But it’s also easy enough that the kids have a blast.
Bake the Cookies
Make sugar cookies with your favorite recipe or one of our sugar cookie mixes. Cut them out as you would for other cookies to decorate.
Use your favorite recipe or you can try our sugar cookie mix.
Frost the Cookies
After cooling, frost your cookies with either royal icing or fondant.
Royal icing is simply a powdered sugar icing with meringue powder or an egg white added. With meringue powder or an egg white, it dries to a hard shell and creates a nice, glossy surface for painting.
It’s super easy to cover your cookies with rolled fondant. Roll the fondant to about 1/8-inch thick and cut the fondant using the same cookie cutters that you used to make the cookies. Lift the fondant off the counter, brush a little water on the back with your finger, and lay the fondant on the cookies of corresponding shape. The fondant will cover the cookies to about 1/8-inch of the edges and the moist back will hold the fondant in place.
Fondant creates a little different effect than does royal icing. While royal icing is slick and shiny, fondant is more of a matte finish.
Paint the Cookies
Use food colors for paint. Professional food color gels are best; they are so concentrated that they cover well and can be diluted with water. We usually use a drop of food color to several drops of water. There are over 40 colors to choose from.
The food colors found in stores don’t work nearly as well. They are more diluted and more pastel instead of the bright, vibrant colors of gels. They cost more than the gels too.
Use a watercolor brush and paint your cookies just as if you were using water colors. For fine work, such as the eyes on a snowman or the star on a Christmas tree, use a toothpick to dab color on.
It’s fun to make pretty, painted cookies and you can be as creative as you like. If you are more of an artist than we are, you can create stunning works of art with cookies and a paint brush.
About Meringue Powder
Meringue powder can be used in most frosting applications. When frosting cookies, add a tablespoon of meringue powder. It will make your frosting just firm enough that the cookies won’t mar or stick together easily. For true hard shell royal icing, use more meringue powder.
Add meringue powder to your whipped cream as a stabilizer. One tablespoon per cup of whipping cream will slow melting so that your desserts are more attractive and the whipped cream lasts longer.
Another fun idea for Halloween coming up is homemade face paint.
Halloween Face Paint
(Recipe used with permission from Nancy’s Kitchen)
1 teaspoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon water
1/2 teaspoon cold cream
2 drops food coloring
In a small mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients and mix well.
Have fun making memories!
About the Author
Dennis Weaver has burned food from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Miami, Florida. He is the founder of The Prepared Pantry in Rigby, Idaho. He loves to help people bake and shares his vast collection of cooking and baking knowledge on his blog as well as in his e-books and magazines. Dennis lives in Rigby, Idaho, with his wife, Merri Ann. They have five wonderful children and six beautiful granddaughters.
