Decorate Sugar Cookies

An all purpose sugar cookie recipe for cookie designers! A great sugar cookie recipe that is great both in both flavour and texture for your design!

Course Cookie

Cuisine American

Keyword creative food, design, sugar cookie

In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Flatten the dough into a 2 inch disk. Do not chill the dough in a ball. Cover, and chill dough for at least one hour (or overnight).
Preheat oven to 400 degrees°F (200 degrees C).
Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into shapes with any cookie cutter. Place cookies 1 inch apart on ungreased cookie sheets.
Bake 6 to 8 minutes in preheated oven. or until the rims of the cookie give a slight brown colour. Cool completely.

In a large bowl, add the powdered sugar and meringue powder and mix together. Using an electric mixer on low speed, add in the extracts and water (1 tablespoon at a time) and mix until smooth.
If you're planning to color the icing, this is the stage where you should mix that in. If making multiple colors, divide the icing into smaller bowls and place a damp paper towel over the bowls you don't plan to use first.
The goal with the royal icing is that it's thick enough that it won't run off the side of the cookie, but thin enough that it will meld together. So how do you know when that is? Well, you use a method called "15 second icing". This means that when you run a knife through the icing, the icing should go back to how it was within 15 seconds.
Keep any icing that isn’t being immediately used covered with plastic wrap as it dries out very quickly. Transfer to piping bags and decorate cookies.

Take the desire colour of the royal icing in a bowl. Add a few drops of water to the bowl. Mix vigorously until smooth and with the consistency you like. Transfer to a pipping bag and carefully flood the cookies along the perimeter of the cookie outlined with the royal icing.

If your icing has started to harden, add a drop or two of water to bring it back to your desired consistency so it doesn’t clog your piping tips. However, avoid making the icing too thin as it’ll lead to air bubbles which is not good for cookie decorating.
When using royal icing to decorate cookies, pipe the outline icing first, then flood it. Outlining means piping a thin outline of the cookie with thicker icing and flooding means filling the middle with thinner icing. Piping an outline first keeps the icing from sliding off the cookies.
Add a few drops of water to the icing and stir with a spatula for a flooding consistency. Continue adding water until you achieve the desired icing consistency.