I designed the Forget-Me-Not Easter Egg Sugar Cookies to be a wonderful beginner sugar cookie project. Royal Icing is not for the meek—there is a learning curve—but I assure you it is not a steep curve. With patience and practice your cookies will start out a little rough, but drastically improve as you work on your skills.

There are many nuanced tips that make a huge difference in the outcome of your icing. For example, the icing bag is easy to hold and squeeze when the icing consistency is correct and when you hold from the back and squeeze toward the tip. Unfortunately most beginners squeeze near the tip and the icing oozes from the back of the bag. The reusable bag ties from Wilton are large rubber bands that work well when this is a problem for yourself, or when you are teaching junior decorators. Your icing will stay put in the bag and only flow out of the tip until you have this under control. I host an annual Family Cookie Baking Day at my home and always include Christmas sugar cookies with bags of icings in all the festive colors as well as dishes of sprinkles, so these bag ties really keep the icing neat and make it fun for everyone at all skill levels.

Outlining is another area where the right technique is easy, but so important. Touch the icing tip down onto the cookie and begin squeezing the bag gently while you lift the tip back off of the cookie and start moving. Allow the icing to “drop” into place and you will have a better line that is easier to place. Holding the icing bag in one hand while you direct with a fingertip from your other hand will bring balance and precision. Flooding the outline is very easy, try to fill with less gaps and it takes less effort to finish and have a smooth surface. Outlining and flooding works best when the icing is the right consistency and recognizing the consistency is also going to improve with practice.

Adding the flowers is really easy, just make even and evenly spaced dots of icing and use a toothpick or pointy tool to drag the icing into petal and leaf shapes. I use a pointed tool from my Quilling kit, it wasn’t really designed for decorating but it works perfectly.

Every year for Christmas I host a “Family Baking Day” where I make dozens of sugar cookies and prepare colorful tubes of royal icing and we have a great deal of fun creating beautiful Christmas Sugar Cookies.  I have had a bit of practice working with sugar cookie dough and royal icing and I have had my failures and my successes, so this puts me in a pretty good position to direct my family members in making their cookie designs.

Our family baking day is a two-part day. First I ask each person (or family group) to bring prepared, but not yet baked, cookie dough. This way no one is mixing dough during our party.  I pull out all of the baking sheets and set up a loading, cooling and finished cookie station in the kitchen. Second, I set up a large table with my baked sugar cookie cutouts, bags of icing and as many colorful sprinkles and toppings as I can round up and I create a creative “arts and crafts with cookies” area.

It used to be just the ladies, and we would send the guys to the other room to watch football, but slowly they would start creeping in and now they are equally involved and there’s no game on the television. We just put “Elf” in the DVD player and set it on repeat. How is it that we don’t get tired of that movie?!?

I have some very talented family members who jump right in and create beautiful cookies and I have others who as less artistically inclined. With simple guidelines, my non-baking and non-decorating family members have created some beautiful cookies, and I find that having a few tried and true techniques will help ensure their success and create a feeling of accomplishment.

At the end of the day, I served a nice light salad, usually with a rotisserie chicken chunked up and tossed in, to give us a little protein boost and try to counter all of the cookies that we eat.

In this video I will show you just a couple of easy techniques and a few quick tips on how to hold the icing bag and direct the tip.

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