Decorating Christmas Cookies

In our family, the days after Thanksgiving are for eating leftovers, holiday decorating, and our family's favorite holiday activity: making cookies. We make cookies to give as gifts, to enjoy as treats, but being a family of talented, artistically-minded people, we also see it as a chance to make edible art together.

A few days beforehand I like to make sure I have some necessary basics - lots of flour and sugar, food coloring, sprinkles, raisins (perfect for the gingerbread men's eyes), and wax paper. Some years I make my own cookie dough, but this year I decided to simplify life for myself and bought premade cookie dough at the store in gingerbread and sugar cookie flavors.

I also discovered our local store now carries cookie decorating kits with a wide assortment of silver BBs, colored sugars, and candy sprinkles, and, of course, I made sure to pick up some candy stars for the top of the tree-shaped cookies. We also make our own colored sugar by mixing a couple drops of food coloring into a small bowl of granulated sugar. Easy and quick, you can have any entire sugar rainbow in just a few minutes at a fraction of what you would pay for decorating sugars.

When rolling out the dough, I like to line my workspace with wax paper. This simplifies clean-up significantly and keeps the dough from sticking. I also like to have a small bowl of flour on hand to sprinkle on my work surface and on the rolling pin as well as to dip the cookie cutters in. A little planning ahead of time helps to avoid broken, torn cookies and sticky messes and ensures that we'll have more fun decorating.

In our house we set up an assembly line where I roll out the cookie dough and with some assistance from the youngest children cut out shapes to be placed on cookie tins lined with parchment paper for easy, simple clean-up. Each child (and many times each adult as well!) gets their own cookie tray to decorate as they like. While the children are giving the gingerbread men chocolate chip buttons and decorating their cookie trees with silver BBs, I can roll out yet more dough or clean up the sack of flour that someone accidentally elbowed off the table. As soon as the first batch of decorating is done, into the oven they go and make way for the next batch to be shaped, sugared, and decorated.

Another technique we often use for holiday cookies is egg paint. Egg yolks, separated out from the whites - which can be saved and used to make meringues - are divided into small cups and then tinted with food coloring. Bold, shockingly bright colors can be created with this simple recipe that work well with any cookie recipe. With new, clean brushes (not the ones your children use with the poster paints or water colors!), cut out sugar or gingerbread cookies can be painted any way you like.

With these ideas, I'm certain your family can also create holiday traditions they will always remember by creating beautiful edible art. The only problem is how many of the cookies are likely to turn out too pretty to eat!