Your Cookie decorating skills don't have to be top-notch. They're cookies. They need to taste good and look bright and pretty. These cookies will do the trick.
The keys to success with these cookies are:
Cutting the dough nice and thick.
Using Cream Cheese in the frosting.
Adding a wee bit of Milk to your paste or gel food colouring and painting it on in the most abstract of ways with a little paint brush from the dollar store.
That's it! Your cookies will amaze everyone. It is the holiday season, after all.
Soft Sugar Cookies
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
2 1/2 cups flour
1 Teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Beat butter and sugar together with a paddle attachment on your stand mixture well. Add eggs, one at a time and beat until light and fluffy. Mix in vanilla. Sift together dry ingredients and slowly add to the wet mixture.
Turn dough onto lightly floured surface. Roll thickly - about 1/4". After cutting out shapes, chill the cut pieces for about ten minutes before baking at 400 degrees for 6-8 minutes.
Cream Cheese Frosting for Painting
(This is also Saucy's Whoopie Pie filling)
6 ounces cream cheese, softened to room temperature
3/4 stick of butter (where butter stick is 1/2 cup)4 cups icing sugar
1 teaspoon milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
Cream the butter and cream cheese together, do not over whip. Mix in the icing sugar, then the milk and vanilla. Add more milk to make thinner for frosting the cookies, it will harden very well.
This frosting recipe will cover two batches of the above recipe of cookies with some leftover.
To paint your cookies, put a tiny bit of green food colour paste or gel (Saucy uses Wilton Leaf Green) onto a small plate. Pour about a half teaspoon of milk onto the plate and drag a small clean paint brush through the milk and the colour. Using the cookie as your canvas, gently brush the pattern you desire into the frosting while it is still not set (for this look... you can also wait to paint your cookies after the frosting dries but that is a completely different look). Swirl and paint and pull the pigment through the frosting, adding more colour from the paint/milk mixture as you like.
Don't forget to add your favourite holiday sprinkles before the frosting dries! Happy cookie-baking days.
This post first appeared on Saucy's Sprinkles (bloggedy Blog Blog), please read the originial post: here
