So you’ve baked your cookies and now you are ready for the really fun part, decorating them. To decorate the cookies you will need Butter-cream frosting. Cover a table with a plastic sheet, old clean white sheet or sheets of Baker’s Parchment paper.
You will need:
Butter Cream Frosting
Food coloring
Various flavorings
Several small bowls or cups
Several table knives
Colored sugars, sprinkles, dragées*,
currants, red-hots, coconut flakes
Small, resalable plastic sandwich bags
Scissors
A glass of cold water
A clean cloth with one end moistened |
Ready to Begin |
Start with the frosting. Put 2 or 3 spoons full of plain white frosting in each of several small bowls or cups. Tint them with food coloring. AND DO BE CAREFUL! It is easier to add more color but you can’t take it out. Start with just a drop, mix it in well and then add more if you want the color deeper. WARNING! If you accidently get the color way to dark, don’t try adding more white frosting to the dark color. Put some white frosting into another small bowl and begin slowly adding a bit of the color that got to dark to the white. |
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You may now flavor each color appropriately; yellow – lemon, orange – orange, black – anis or liquorish, green – spearmint, red or pink – peppermint or cinnamon, white – vanilla and I have never been able to figure out a good flavor for blue.
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Now you are ready to begin. Let your imagination run wile. Have fun. I have some standard ways I decorate my cookies but I am sure you will come up with many wonderful designs of your own.
I give Santa a red suit trimmed with white fur and a white beard. A bit of coconut makes his beard fuzzy and put 2 small dots of frosting on his face and stick currant to them for his eyes. The same for the buttons on his coat. I like to dust his red coat with red sugar. I frost Christmas trees green and scatter green sugar on some, colored sprinkles on others for ornaments. And on and on. Get with it. Have a ball. |
What are the sandwich bags for? Put 2 or 3 spoons full of frosting in a sandwich bag, seal it shut, snip of a tiny bit off one corner with sharp scissors and you have a frosting bag for writing and outlining your cookies.
What are the sandwich bags for? Put 2 or 3 spoons full of frosting in a sandwich bag, seal it shut, snip of a tiny bit off one corner with sharp scissors and you have a frosting bag for writing and outlining your cookies.
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The glass of water is handy if you need to thin some of your frostings a bit
and the moist cloth is for cleaning your knives.
* A dragée is a tiny sugar ball, usually with a metallic coating. They are available is several sizes. They come in silver, gold and copper finishes. They have long been a standard decorative item for holiday baking and wedding cakes.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers the metallic-finish dragées to be inedible. Early in the 20th century, the silver finish may have contained mercury, however it no longer does. Dragées are difficult to find in California due to a 2003 lawsuit. |
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