Decorating Cookies

Hi Vivasuzi, That sounds like fun! So did your advisor tell you to add food coloring to make various shades of frosting? For detail on your cookies...Betty Crocker has adorable little tubes of Decorating Gel in a number of colors. You can make little eyes on the chicks and the bunnies and if you have any egg shaped cookies, you can make stripes and dots to decorate those. Also, you can get the shoe string black licorice and make whiskers on the bunnies and a little coconut for the tails. Just press that in before the frosting dries. There are also various varieties of sprinkles available, a little pricey though.

I like to use the royal frosting because you can tint it to any color you like. It is easy to make and almost goof proof as long as you don't add too much water to it. I wrote a couple of huge pieces on it over at Epinions if you want to check them out: Cookie Making & Decorating 101: Going Beyond The Chocolate Chip Cookie http://www.epinions.com/content_4725710980 = and = Making "Royal Icing", It's A Lot Easier Than You Think! http://www.epinions.com/content_4290748548 The royal icing can be kept for about a week in the fridge; store it in a squeeze bottle or make sure that the bowl is wrapped well. I have been playing around with using just the icing on some parchment paper to make various shapes for a 3-D design for a competition.

Royal icing, as already suggested is probably the best for what you want. You can do a wonderful job using this. Beyond that mostly just dye frostings and let the kids have fun with them. They have a great time decorating a bunch of the cookies themselves using their imaginations. Besides the frostings, I set out small dishes of sprinkles, chocolate chips, m&ms, small gumdrops, and any other small candies that I think they might like to use on their cookies.

For big sugar cookies, the key is "flooding". That is when you use thick icing to trace the outline of what you'd like to be that color. Then you thin the icing out a little with hot water to a thinner consistency and use that to "flood" the area inside the thick icing line. This will give you a smooth, even layer once it dries. It is actually very easy to do, and kids are great at the "flooding" part because it requires less fine motor skills. You'll want to use royal icing (I noticed a few links above). It is actually very easy to do, you just need to make time the day before you plan to serve the cookies. My sis and I make them for the big Xmas spread and we do snowflakes with those silverbead thingys on them -- just place them or the sprinkles you choose to use on the icing after a few minutes as sometimes the colored sugars melt into the icing.