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Everyone loves edible art. Painted cookies are right up there as one of my favorite goodies to bring to the office. The first time I proposed our family spend a day icing cookies, there were sighs and moans. Since when did boys like to decorate cookies? – Since I found this cool technique to really make it fun. In fact, just yesterday I invited another family over to decorate with us. My friend didn’t think her 15 year old son would be very excited about decorating, but he ended up making several to give to his girlfriend. Can you say “cool points?”

Don’t worry about having all kinds of special tools and ingredients. The only mildly unsual ingredient is powdered egg whites and once you find it, it stays good a long time. Believe it or not, I use plastic baggies to pipe the icing on. It’s fast, easy to handle, and I throw them away when I’m done.

Here’s the secret… Use the icing recipe below, because it has the right texture and dries hard enough to transport later.

Here’s the technique… Put some icing in a baggie and rubberband it shut. Snip off one tiny corner to use for piping. Do this for each color you’re using. Draw bullseyes on the cookie in different colors so they touch each other. Now drag a toothpick from the center of the cookie to one of the points. Repeat for each point until the cookie is symetrical. If you want a flower petal appearance, do the same thing but then drag the toothpick between the first set of lines but in the reverse direction (outside to center). Baggies and toothpicks also make it easy to drop dots or swirls of color on the snowflakes. Candied beads also dress up the cookies nicely. Since metallic beads are no longer considered safe to eat, I buy “naked” candies beads and roll them in cookie luster dust, purchased online.

If you want some great cookie dough recipes, email me. I have a nice sugar cookie, chocolate almond cookie, or spiced gingerbread cookie recipe I’ll send you.

Cookie Icing Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 16-oz bag powdered sugar
• 3 Tbsp meringue powder (or powdered egg whites)
• paste food colorings (to make vivid colors)
• 1 tsp flavored extract (lemon, almond, buttercream, orange, vanilla, etc)

Directions:

Mix at low speed, powdered sugar, meringue powder, and 1/3 cup warm water until mixture is stiff and knife comes out clean, about 7 minutes. Now add extract and enough water so that the icing briefly holds its shape but then blends back in. Mix well. This extra water thins the icing so the colors can bleed on the cookie.

Divide the icing into separate baggies and then tint each frosting bag with food colorings or pastes as desired (pastes will give you more vivid colors). I always buy the primary paste colors and mix everything else. Those colors enable you to mix everything from Christmas colors to the 70′s style flower child orange-great for flowers.