I love making Christmas cookies and giving them to our neighbors and friends as gifts!
These adorable Christmas Decorated Sugar Cookies are made using simple ingredients and a cookie cutter. Use a simple roll out sugar cookie and royal icing.
Don’t be intimidated about making royal icing and these festive sugar cookies! With each cookie you make you’ll get better and better!
Sugar Cookie Dough
The sugar cookie dough needs time to chill in the fridge to solidify the butter and make sure the cookies don’t spread too much while baking. But this sugar cookie dough is super simple to make with only a few ingredients!
My favorite Santa cookie cutter is available on Amazon! Anne Clark makes all these adorable cookie cutters in Rutland, Vermont. Many of my cookie cutters come from The Sweet Designs.
Bake rolled sugar cookies and let them cool completely. Below you can see the step images of the process of decorating each cookie.
Royal Icing
- Royal icing is made with only 3- ingredients. Powdered sugar, meringue powder and water.
- This icing hardens, so you want to be sure and have a clean, damp kitchen towel over your bowl preventing it from drying out as you make sugar cookies.
- Also be sure that nothing has any grease on it. Or your royal icing will not harden properly.
Make royal icing and thin it out with egg whites in a separate bowl to get the consistency you want. Add drops of food coloring to the separate bowls.
Pipe royal icing around the outer edge of the cookie. Then flood each section with thinned out royal icing. Working in steps, pipe on one section at a time.
The royal icing needs to dry thoroughly, about 12 hours before packaging your cookies up into baggies.
Finally added details to each cookie. Once you get the royal icing down, you can let your creativity take over! Be sure and check out Sweetopia’s amazing video on how to decorate festive Christmas cookies! Be inspired this holiday season!
Aren’t these Vintage red trucks adorable? This is my favorite (and most popular design) that I make for the holidays! Get the cookie cutter HERE!
One of my favorite cookies is the Truck with Christmas Tree cookie cutter. There are several great options! Truck with Tree and this one Truck with Christmas Tree. You really can’t go wrong with either one of these!
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Christmas Decorated Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
Decorated Sugar Cookies
- 1 ½ cups butter softened
- 2 cups granulated sugar
- 4 large eggs room temperature
- 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
- ½ teaspoon almond extract
- 5 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
Royal Icing
- 4 cups powdered sugar
- 3 tablespoons meringue powder
- 5 tablespoons water
Instructions
Decorated Sugar Cookies
- In a large mixing bowl, using a stand mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth and fluffy.
- Beat in the eggs, vanilla, and almond extract. Stir in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix until combined thoroughly. Scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl with a rubber spatula occasionally.
- Place the cookie dough into a large Ziploc bag and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour or overnight.
- Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Roll out the dough on a lightly floured work surface to about ½-inch thick. Cut into shapes with cookie cutters. Place the cookies carefully onto parchment lined half sheet pans, leaving a little space for them to expand.
- Bake for 8 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Cool completely before decorating.
Royal Icing
- In a large mixing bowl of a stand mixer, beat all ingredients at medium speed until icing forms peaks and loses its sheen, 7-10 minutes.
- If peaks are not forming, increase the mixer speed and continue to beat. To prevent drying, cover the bowl with a damp cloth while working with icing.
Video
Recipe Notes
Nutrition
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Silvia says
These Santa cookies are absolutely adorable! Thanks so much for including the step by step visual and the video!! so helpful
Jessica Robinson says
They are such a great cookie and make a wonderful holiday gift! Thanks for visiting Silvia!
Stephanie | Adventures in Aussieland says
These are absolutely adorable. Making Christmas cookies have always been a big tradition in my family. I’ve been slacking since I moved to Australia though.
Brittany says
How cute are these! These look so fun to make. Kids would love to make them. Saving this for later!!
Kiwi says
We already talking about Christmas lol! wEll these are some really cute Santa cookies!
London Mumma says
These are the cutest Christmas cookies, great to make with the kids and eat too.