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, patriotic star cookies, and snowflake cookies to celebrate winter. Colorful sugar cookie icing is easy to make with 4 ingredients. I also share a clever method for creating cookie icing designs, using DIY piping bags!
The Best Sugar Cookie Icing Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 tbsp. butter
- 2 cups powdered sugar
- 2 tbsp. milk
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- food coloring
Directions
- Step 1
- First, melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.
- Step 2
- Once the butter is melted, turn the heat down to low.
- Step 3
- Mix in half the powdered sugar to make a paste.
- Step 4
- Add the milk and vanilla.
- Step 5
- Stir in the rest of the powdered sugar and mix until smooth.
- Step 6
- Pour the warm icing into small bowls, and mix in a few drops of food coloring into each.
- Step 7
- Or make a single color and pour the warm icing into a piping bag.
- Step 8
- Decorate the cookies while the icing is still warm, and enjoy!
Once you’ve mixed in the powdered sugar, you can experiment a bit. If you need to make a larger quantity of sugar cookie icing, you can add several more cups of powdered sugar and more spoonfuls of milk until you’ve made enough icing. More powdered 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 cookie frosting at the right thickness, stir in the food coloring.
Important note: Unlike royal icing, this warm icing uses a single consistency for both outlining and filling. This easy icing recipe is great to make for kids who want to decorate their own cookies!
Making different colors: If you’d like to make several colors of icing, divide the white sugar cookie icing into small bowls. Mix a different color of food coloring into each bowl of icing. If the sugar cookie icing starts 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 frosting designs.
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 icing in the microwave for 5 seconds at a time if it becomes too stiff.
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 sugar cookie variation, especially if you are making sugar cookies for a friend or loved one with dietary restrictions. You can find my go-to gluten free sugar cookie recipe here.
Flavored sugar cookie icing would be fun to make. You could mix in any candy flavoring to make flavored frosting! I would try making icing flavors such as strawberry, lemon, or almond.
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’m a homeschool mom who’s traveling the world with my husband and 4 kids. We raised our family in North Idaho and currently live in Mérida, Mexico. I love Jesus, coffee, creative projects, photography, and traveling. I hope you enjoy our creative ideas and family adventures!
