Cute sugar cookies are a great family project to make for practically any holiday. Most everyone loves cookies and you can customize your cookies to match the season! Make heart cookies for Valentine’s Day, star cookies for Fourth of July and snowflake cookies to celebrate winter. Colorful sugar cookie icing is easy to make with 4 ingredients. I discovered a super efficient method for creating cookie icing designs, without using pastry bags that can be hard to clean.
The Best Sugar Cookie Icing Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 tbsp. butter
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 2 tbsp. milk
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- food coloring
Make the best sugar cookie icing that dries when it cools using these easy stove top instructions. First, melt 1 tbsp. butter in a medium sauce pan over medium heat. Once the butter is melted, turn the heat down to low. Mix in enough powered sugar to make a paste. Add 2 tbsp. milk and 1 tsp. vanilla. Stir in the rest of the powdered sugar until smooth.
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This step is where you can experiment a bit. If you need to make a larger quantity of sugar cookie icing, you can add several more cups of powered sugar and more spoonfuls of milk until you’ve made enough icing. More powered sugar will make the icing thicker and more milk will make the icing thinner. Keep the icing on low heat as you mix it, because it will start to harden as it cools. Once you’ve mixed up enough sugar cooking icing at the right thickness, stir in the food coloring.
If you’d like to make several colors of icing, divide the white sugar cookie icing into separate bowls. Mix a different color of food coloring into each bowl of icing. If the sugar cookie icing start to get stiff and you want to make it thinner, you can reheat the icing in the microwave for 5 seconds at a time.
DIY Easy to Use Sugar Cookie Icing Bags
Make your own throw-away icing bags! Use this innovative method for creating intricate icing designs. First, spoon the warm sugar cookie icing into a sandwich bag and twist the opening closed, allowing extra air out first.
Next, snip off the corner of the bag using scissors, so the icing flows from the bag in a controlled manner. Too small of a hole may cause the bag to rip when you apply pressure. Too large of a hole will make it hard to create precise designs with the sugar cookie icing.
Finally, apply gentle pressure to the twisted-closed icing bag so the icing flows steadily from the corner hole. You can outline and fill in each cookie, create stripes and dots, or make detailed icing designs.
You can easily make several bags of different colored sugar cookie icing. You’ll want to work with each bag of icing quickly so the icing doesn’t cool and become hard to use. You can heat up the sugar cookie icing in the microwave for 5 seconds at at time if it becomes too stiff.
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Decorate your cookies by squeezing the icing out of your DIY icing bag to make outlines and designs on each sugar cookie. I like to outline each cookie and make a scribble design, which is faster than perfectly filling in each cookie. I topped each cookie with a mixture of colorful sprinkles and candy pearls.
My kids and I decorated sugar cookies for Valentine’s Day with red and purple icing and colorful sprinkles. These cookies would be cute party favors or surprise treats to give to a friend. Homemade sugar cookies are a fun giftable treat for any holiday!
DIY Sugar Cookie Variations
Chocolate sugar cookies would be a yummy variation to the classic sugar cookie recipe. Just make sure you have plenty of cocoa powder on hand.
Gluten free cookies are another great variation, especially if you are making sugar cookies for a friend or loved one with dietary restrictions. I haven’t tried making gluten free cookies yet but I’d love to find a good gluten free cookie recipe.
Flavored sugar cookie icing would be fun to make. You could mix in any candy flavoring to make flavored icing! I would try making icing flavors such as strawberry, toffee or almond.
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If you make these adorable sugar cookies for Valentine’s Day, you can pair each one with a homemade Valentine or collectible character card. The colorful sugar cookie icing and festive sprinkles give these cookies a pop of color that’s perfect for Valentine’s Day!
This project is easy to accomplish with kids in an afternoon. Decorating cookies with sugar cookie icing is a creative edible art project and a fun way to make some colorful treats!
Hi, I’m Katie! I live with my husband and 3 kids in beautiful Coeur d’Alane, Idaho. I love Jesus, coffee, DIY projects, photography, homeschooling my kids, traveling, and serving people. I’ve previously worked as a graphic designer, web designer, journalist and barista. I started Create. Play. Travel. to share some of our creative projects and family adventures. I hope you enjoy the highlights of our creative family life!
This is a fun activity to do with the kids on a no school day. I love the boldness of the colors you did, very vibrant.
The cookies look so pretty and bright. We make our frosting similar to your recipe. I love making homemade frosting.
Wow, it is not only cute but pretty and delicious. It is awesome.
What a fun idea for the kids to make. We love baking around here.
Ooh. I can’t wait to make this! Cookies is one of my all-time favorite desserts, and I make every recipe I find. This one looks so cute.
I love sweets! I’ll make this easy recipe and give it to my friends, they probably want to taste it too
These cookies are so pretty and look delicious! I want some!
What a great idea to decorate cookies! These look like a lot of fun too!
i’ll remember these tips next time i make cookies. yours look amazing!
These cookies look sooo delicious. My son would love this.
Icing truly does scare me, but these cookies are so cute! Thanks for sharing these tips.. I am inspired to give it a try instead of just buying the premade stuff at the store.
These are great tips. I love sugar cookies so I will def. be bookmarking this post.
I like the creative you bring to this. So the colours are beautiful. Thanks.
Thrilled seeing colorful and playful sugar cookie icing will try myself too now following your icing steps.
I’ve always wanted to make cookies like this but they always look so difficult. I think with your instruction, I can do it!
These cookies are so pretty! They came out perfect!
These cookies look yummy! My daughters favorite are frosted sugar cookies so I will have to save this so we can bake together
omg all these colors, amazing!!! I bet they taste great as well. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Chad
http://www.mosaicslab.com
I love that you made your own icing bag. Getting the icing just right would have probably been my downfall, so thanks so much for the tip. These sugar cookies turned out so cute!
If the weather is bad this weekend, we’ll try to make cookies with our kids in the kitchen.