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.