No-Spread Sugar Cookies for Decorating

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This cookie dough rolls out nice and smooth and keeps its shape after baking, making it perfect for detailed Christmas cookie decorating!

I promised you the recipe in my last post with these DIY cookie cutters, so I’m back today to share it!

My favorite cookies during the Christmas season are these, HANDS DOWN. They use hard-boiled egg yolks to make them buttery and sweet and fluffy and almost cake-like, and I love how soft they are! I can eat WAY too many in a single sitting. However, the recipe uses baking powder, which means they puff up in the oven and don’t keep a perfect, crisp shape when baking. While I normally don’t care about that at all when the main goal is getting them from the oven into my belly, decorating cookies with icing work is a different story.

I asked my mom for help on this, and we decided to do a little experimenting to compare recipes on what would make a better cookie precisely for decorating with a lot of detailed icing (like my Ruby cookies!).

The key to cookies keeping their shape as much as possible? Chill them before and after cutting them with cookie cutters! Spread out the sugar cookie dough, cut, then put each cookie shape onto cookie sheets with parchment paper underneath and put them back into the fridge so that they aren’t at room temperature. To save fridge space, you can stack multiple “ready” sheets together separated by the parchment paper and pop them onto baking sheets when ready to bake.

She did some of her own tweaking on a few cookie recipes, and sent me the below. If the goal is to have a nice solid, sharp-edged cookie that’s easy to decorate and look picture-perfect, these came out WAY better. They can also be baked to be nice and strong, so they don’t split in half under the weight of the icing (this happened to me when underbaking or baking my favorite sugar cookie recipe ever). They also taste pretty good! Enjoy!

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Cookie Icing

I’m still learning a LOT about cookie decorating, but luckily, my mom has a ton of cake decorating tools (she is a Pinterest-inspired baking fanatic). The list below are roughly the elements I used to make my cookies:

Buttercream frosting is what I’m most familiar with, which is yummy, but doesn’t have that polished “professional cookie” look you see on social media. So, we tried to make our own royal icing hack instead.

There are two different icing consistencies with cookie decorating, but both are made with the same recipe called royal icing. Once dry and settled, royal icing is what gives cookies that really smooth, professional look. By comparison, royal icing is not necessarily the tastiest icing around, but it does LOOK really good (when you know what you’re doing, that is). Essentially, you make the icing, divide it into colors, and then divide it again into two separate consistencies. The thicker consistency is used for outlining; the thinner consistency is called “flooding” icing, and it’s made simply by mixing water into the icing to thin it out (that’s why you make it and divide and then add water so the colors match). The flooding icing is what fills in the outlines and can get VERY messy! It’s helpful to have a little tool with a sharp end on it (like a metal toothpick) to help push the icing around and get it to flatten out and pop air bubbles. It’s definitely an art to get it to be the right consistencies and to smooth out! I need WAY more practice. It was also my first time using a cookie turn-table-style disc that could be spun around to reach every small area of the cookie, which REALLY helped when the flooding needed to be spread out.

I wanted to see if I could “fake” my way to royal icing by using some premade stuff and adding powdered sugar, but I think using meringue powder and powdered sugar is the better way to go (a great tutorial is here). The next time I decorate cookies, that will definitely be the way I make it.

Chilling

These cookies keep really well in the fridge. However, I learned that if you’re using edible metallic paint, the shimmer will dull a little, so just a head’s up!

In all honesty, I wound up liking these cookies a lot — even with my amateurish flooding! Since our vintage camper Ruby is still in the process of being remodeled, the way the cookies turned out seems even more true to life right now with us working on polishing the exterior! Kinda pretty, kinda shabby, but lots of fun.

That’s all for this post, but there’s more to come, including one more recipe! In case you missed any of the other posts in this series, you can check out ALL of them below. And don’t forget to pin your favorites!

Want easy gift ideas for the baker in your life? Here are my favorite picks for a variety of budgets.