Did you know you can draw on cookies? Yep! You can make your own cute line drawings and colored designs with Royal icing and cookie art. You can also make your own royal icing creating whatever colors you'd like. I think this is definitely a recipe you'll love to play with over and over.
Royal Icing Recipe and Cookie Art
Royal icing can be used to create a hand-drawn design on your homemade cookies. Draw in the line art and then either leave it as is or color it in. Think of it as an edible coloring book! There are plenty of royal icing recipes out there, I found this one the easiest and most successful for me. Not entirely on purpose, I modified the recipe from I Am Baker. The first time I made it, I forgot to add the lemon juice and added a little more milk. I've tried the recipe since with the lemon juice and like both versions. I found our new recipe to work really well. Now my daughter wants to color all the cookies!
Ingredients
- 1 cup powder sugar
- 2 tablespoon milk
- 1 tablespoon light corn syrup
Instructions to Make Royal Icing
- Put the powder sugar in a bowl, then add the corn syrup and 1 tablespoon of milk, stir until blended. If the icing seems a bit too thick, add an extra teaspoon, one at a time, until the consistency you want. I ended up adding a full 2 tablespoons to my icing. I don't know if the Colorado altitude or the dry weather has anything to do with it.
So simple, right?
Tips
If you want to add color to your icing, do it before you add it to the icing bag.
Use a small round tip with your icing bag to pipe the icing outlines and then fill in with a larger tip.
You can use Royal icing on all kinds of things, but generally, sugar cookies are the canvas of choice. In our house, we use cake mix cookies more than anything.
Decorating with Royal icing
What I really love about royal icing… it is a smooth frosting/icing that slightly hardens when dry. So you can make the cookies and then package them up and not worry about the decorations smearing. Because the icing is smooth once it sets, it's perfect for all kinds of flat cookies. So even our slightly bumpy, not so smooth, cake mix cookies look pretty after decorating with royal icing. Your baked cookies don't have to be perfect and will still come out so pretty and special once you've decorated them.
I have a whole variety of fun cake mix cookie ideas you can create and then decorate with royal icing. Check out the creative cookie art inspiration.
So now what are you going to create with your royal icing? I'd love to hear about it!
