Christmas Cookies + BEST Icing for Decorating

I love love love to bake. When I was living at home with my parents, the idea of baking always sounded fun but since no one in my family was an avid baker, we didn't usually keep a ton of baking ingredients on hand. So I would always talk myself out of trying to bake something new. 

When I got married, though, I quickly grew to love and look forward to baking. Mostly because I was baking for my husband, now! It was also pretty resourceful too, because those brown bananas needed to be put to good use, right? In the last few years baking has become something I do regularly and love to do. And when you have two boys under your roof, they will never EVER resent having a Mom who loves to bake! 

Finding a fun set of cookie cutters at Dollar Tree the other day was really what made me want to decorate Christmas cookies, so that's what we did this past Thursday. This was the first time Charlie got to "help" use cookie cutters and he was ALL about it. Not so much the cookie cutting, but definitely the squishing of dough and sneaking handfulls into his mouth faster than we could catch. Seriously, try baking with a one year old soon...you will be amazed at how fast they are at making a mess and sneak-eating.

The gingerbread mix we used was wonderfully prepared by the one and only Betty Crocker. They turned out more like a soft baked cookie than a crunchy gingersnap.While I usually love to make my other favorite cookies homemade, I definitely appreciated the ease of a pre-made mix since we were going all out for our cookie decorating shebang with a toddler included.

BUTTERCREAM JUST LIKE ROYAL ICING 

Royal icing is all the hype right now, but I'm still a little weirded out about using a raw egg like that, and feeding it to my little one. So we made a batch of buttercream and it ended up being the most royal-icing like buttercream I have EVER seen. You'll notice on my cookies (especially the Grandma Snowman) how the frosting smoothed out similar to royal icing. So if you are looking for the royal icing effect with a classic buttercream taste, I would definitely recommend this recipe.

Ingredients:

3 cups powdered sugar

1/3 cup butter, softened

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1-2 tablespoons milk


Directions:

1. Start by mixing 2 cups of the powdered sugar and softened butter with a mixer. (You will add in the third cup of powdered sugar later.)

2. Add the vanilla extract and 1-2 tablespoons of milk to the mixture and incorporate with the mixer again.

3. Add in the last cup of powdered sugar, little by little, mixing after each addition. If the mixture is becoming super thick, do not add anymore of the powdered sugar. It's okay if you don't use all of the last cup of powdered sugar. In order to achieve a "royal icing-like" consistency, you will want the frosting to be slightly thinner than normal buttercream would be. I found that using the mixer for a minute or two also allowed for a smoother texture on the icing.

4. Once the consistency is right, add in food color of your choice for decorating!

My plate

Husband's plate

I hope you all get a chance to do some cookie decorating this year! We cut and baked the cookies together as a family, but once Charlie was in bed for the night we had a cookie decorating "date" at the kitchen table and it's one of my favorite holiday memories so far this year. It doesn't have to be fancy (I used Dollar Tree items and pre-made mix! ;), it only has to be fun!


Merry Christmas, friends!