How to Ice Cookies

Up your cookie game and make your cookies fancier by decorating them with colored icing, the easy way.

I’ve always loved decorating. It doesn’t matter if it’s cookies or cakes or even a word doc. To get myself interested and stop procrastinating I start decorating and it instantly gets me motivated. I still remember how in my Uni days I would procrastinate for hours, and to really get myself started on my assignments I would take atleast 30 minutes to decorate my word doc. It always worked for me and does till date. So when I made these all butter cookies which BTW are absolutely delish even without the icing, I was inclined to decorating them and making them prettier. So I made my easy peasy cookie icing which I also used for my snowflake chocolate cookies and colored it three ways to come up with these!

To make these cookies, use my All Butter Cookies as the base and once they’re done and cooled down start by preparing the icing. I’ve used liquid color for my icing here which is less concentrated but if you’re looking for brighter colors use gel colors so that you improve the color without liquefying the icing. You need to pay close attention to the consistency of the icing and keep it paste-y. If it turns liquidy, it will not set as well as it should and won’t dry properly. The best part about this icing is that unline royal icing (which is ideally what’s used to ice cookies) it’s eggless. I cannot bear the though of raw eggs slathered all over my cookies so I came up with this rather genius alternative. It’s icing sugar mixed with milk and little vanilla essence. If you get the consistency right, you can even pipe it on the cookies rather than just smearing it on.

Icing cookies is a rather easy thing to do and is simpler than it looks. So gather your ingredients and get started with these.

What you need:

All Butter Cookies or any cookies for the base.
Icing Sugar, 175 grams
Milk, 2 tablespoon
Vanilla Essence, 1 teaspoon
Liquid Food Color
Tooth Picks

What you need to do:

Start by mixing your icing sugar, vanilla essence and milk together in a bowl until you form a thick liquid consistency. If it’s runny, add more icing sugar. The mixture shouldn’t be runny at all otherwise it won’t dry well.

Divide the icing to 3 bowls and add in a different food color to each bowl to achieve the desired colors. For these colors I added a single drop of liquid color to the icing as I was aiming for a lighter shade. For a darker shade, use gel color. They’re more concentrated so they’ll give a brighter color without liquefying the icing.

Once the liquids are mixed, start adding spoonfuls of them onto your cookies and spreading them with toothpicks. Stay away from the sides.

Once you’ve iced all your cookies, let them dry for atleast 1 hour. Drying up time really depends on the consistency of the icing. If it’s runny, cookies will take longer to dry.

Store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator.