5 Ways to Get Fancy with Your Sugar Cookies (2024)

FAQs

5 Ways to Get Fancy with Your Sugar Cookies? ›

Take plain sugar cookies up a notch with exciting mix-ins like chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles, toasted chopped nuts, chopped dried fruit or M&M's. Add these after blending your butter and egg into the sugar cookie mix. This is our favorite hack for holiday Pillsbury cookie dough.

Take plain sugar cookies up a notch with exciting mix-ins like chocolate chips, rainbow sprinkles, toasted chopped nuts, chopped dried fruit or M&M's. Add these after blending your butter and egg into the sugar cookie mix. This is our favorite hack for holiday Pillsbury cookie dough.

Royal icing is the key to perfectly iced cookies. The secret ingredients are powdered sugar and meringue powder (or whipped pasteurized egg whites). That's it! You could add a small amount of lemon juice for flavor that won't disrupt the pure white color of the icing, but that's your call.

Use Squeeze Bottles to Decorate Cookies with Icing

I find that squeeze bottles work just as well for decorating and are easier for us non-pro bakers to work with. Plus, they're easy to clean! My favorites are little eight-ounce squeeze bottles that you can find at Michael's and other craft stores.

Add Embellishments In addition to common decorating options like sprinkles and glitter, consider cinnamon candies, jelly beans, crushed peppermint candies, gum drops, and chocolate morsels. Place decorations in the glaze while it is still soft; once the glaze dries, it will act like glue.

Consistency is Key. A major element in consistently well-baked cookies is, well, consistency. If all the cookies are about the same size and shape, they are more likely to bake evenly. This way, with the same baking time, you don't get some cookies that are overbaked while others are still too doughy.

It might be old hat by now, but it's still true: Salt makes cookies taste better. There's salt in the dough, of course, but for an extra hit and a nice crackly texture, sprinkle your dough balls with flaky salt (we love Maldon) before baking.

There are many varieties of classifications for cookies. This refers to the way in which the cookie is prepared after the dough has been made. For example, there are drop, icebox, bar, sheet, cut out, pressed, rolled, molded or wafer.

Cornstarch helps product soft and thick cookies. Using more brown sugar than white sugar results in a moister, softer cookie. An extra egg yolk increases chewiness. Rolling the cookie dough balls to be tall and lumpy instead of wide and smooth gives the cookies a bakery-style textured thickness.

Since moisture helps cookies stay soft and fresh, adding a slice of white bread into the container with cookies can help. The moisture from the bread slice transfers to the cookies, preventing them from getting dry. White bread is best for this hack so that no flavor is added to the cookies.

How can I decorate my cookies? ›

Make a bowl of Sugar Cookie Icing or Royal Icing and divide into bowls. Add food coloring and/or thin to the desired consistency. At this point, you can outline cookies with your medium icing, flood it with thin icing, let it dry, then add details with thick icing.

Frosting Method

You can use either homemade or store-bought frosting for this method. Just make sure the frosting is soft but not too runny—sprinkles will not stick to dry, stiff frosting. Top your cooled cookies with frosting. Before it sets, simply drop on your sprinkles of choice.

Insert food-safe wooden crafts sticks into sandwich creme cookies. Dip cookies into melted bittersweet chocolate chips. Add chocolate-covered pretzels for ears, candy eyeballs and a cinnamon imperial for the nose.

You can never go wrong with layering your cookies on a simple plate or board! Most of the time, especially when I just bake up one batch of cookies, I will display the cookies on a serving plate, raised stand, or a domed serving plate. One of the new trends floating around on social media is a cookie board!