Sugar Cookie Secrets

I love sugar cookies around the holidays, but they're an awful lot of work to make. Make the dough. Refrigerate it for two hours. Roll the dough on a floury, messy counter top surface. Cut the dough into shapes. Bake. Frost. See? Lots of steps. Therefore, as much as I love them, I usually leave the difficult baking jobs to my mom. She'll save plenty of cookies for me to devour at Christmas.

This year, however, I made a boatload of sugar cookies for my Christmas Cookie Swap at the beginning of December. I spent an entire day making unfrosted cookies for the kids' frost-your-own-cookie table thinking they'd go nuts with the activity and I'd need lots of cookies. The kids did have fun, but I didn't need nearly as many cookies as I thought. After the party, I was left with two Tupperware containers full of unfrosted sugar cookies.

What I've since discovered are a few tips to frosting sugar cookies:

1) Frost sugar cookies when you're not burnt from baking. I sat down at the table the other day during Tory's afternoon nap, laid out all my frosting ingredients and wax paper and JUST FROSTED COOKIES. It was relaxing. I listened to Christmas music and took my time decorating lovely Christmas cookies for our friends and neighbors. Usually, by the time the frosting part of sugar cookie making rolls around, I'm so over the whole process I'm just trying to get it done. From this point forward, I'm always going to frost another day when I'm fresh and engaged in making them.

2) For the Cookie Swap's frost-your-own-cookie table, I bought these squeeze bottles for the frosting. (I'm sure I could've found them even cheaper at a Dollar Store, but I'm lazy and I like things shipped directly to my doorstep in two days or less). Images of little kids slinging frosting across my dining room entered my brain and I knew I needed some way to contain the temptation. Enter frosting in squeeze bottles. Before the party, I snipped the tops of each bottle to allow more frosting squeeze ease.

Since I had the squeeze bottles on hand, I used them to decorate my sugar cookies this year. BEST. IDEA. EVER! I will forever and always use squeeze bottles to decorate sugar cookies because it made decorating so easy and precise. I filled each squeeze bottle with a frosting color and popped the entire bottle in the microwave for 20 seconds. The result was the perfect consistency of icing in an easy-to-control container for decorating. Each time the frosting thickened enough to cause difficult squeezing, I re-microwaved it for 20 seconds.

My cookies turned out so beautiful, I'm having a hard time eating them! (Naturally, I'm eating all the ugliest ones first).

3) Keep the sprinkles simple. Unless you're a kid, no one really likes to eat a mouthful of crunchy sprinkles, do they? I tend to prefer the cookies with only frosting. The Christmas trees pictured above have a M&M for a the tree topper, which I'm fine with consuming (for artistic purposes, of course). I use sprinkles as a last resort to cover up an already ugly decorating job or when I have no idea how to decorate a cookie. Stars were like that for me this year. Every design I tried looked ugly, so frosting with sprinkles they became.

4) Finally, a little mess is okay. Aside from the flour mess I created in the kitchen in the actual baking of the cookies, frosting them also proved to be on the messy side. Damn those rolly sprinkle balls! I'm still sweeping up sprinkles days after the frost-your-own-cookie table and despite my own efforts to use a plate when sprinkling cookies, I also dropped a few sprinkles on the floor. Eventually, it'll all clean up. Or, the dog will eat it. Or you'll have sprinkles stuck in the crevasses of your table until Easter. It's all part of the art of making sugar cookies.