How to decorate holiday cookies with royal icing

Use our three-ingredients royal icing recipe to jazz up your holiday cookies.

Royal Icing

Ingredients

• 3 egg whites
• 1/4 tsp white vinegar
• 5 cups icing sugar, sifted

Instructions

• BEAT egg whites and vinegar until foamy in a large bowl using an electric mixer. Add icing sugar and mix until combined. Increase speed to high and beat until dense and thick but foamy, about 3 to 7 minutes. Stir in 2 to 4 tbsp cold water to thin the icing out to desired consistency. Stir in gel food colouring, if desired. Transfer to piping bags fitted with a small plain tip to decorate cooled cookies. Let cookies sit at room temperature until icing hardens.

Cookie decorations (in video, clockwise from top):

Hearts: Pipe a border around your cookie with thick royal icing. Flood the cookie with thin royal icing. Immediately pipe dots of another colour of thin royal icing on to your base. The larger the dot, the larger the heart will be. Drag a toothpick in a single line through the dots to create hearts.

Fireworks: Pipe a border around your cookie with thick royal icing. Flood the cookie with thin royal icing. Immediately pipe a dot of another colour of thin royal icing into the centre of your cookie. Pipe concentric circles around the dot. Drag a toothpick from the centre outwards to the edge of your cookie. Turn cookie and repeat until you’re back at the starting point.

Flowers: Pipe a border around your cookie with thick royal icing. Flood the cookie with thin royal icing. Immediately pipe a dot of another colour of thin royal icing into the centre of your cookie. Pipe concentric circles around the dot. Drag a toothpick from the centre outwards to the edge of the cookie. Turn cookie and drag toothpick from the outside into the centre of the cookie. Repeat, alternating directions, until you’re back at the starting point.

Marble: Pipe a border around your cookie with thick royal icing. Flood the cookie with thin royal icing. Immediately pipe horizontal lines of another colour of thin royal icing into the cookie. Bisect the lines by dragging a toothpick across them vertically – first from top to bottom, then next from bottom to top. Repeat, alternating directions, until you reach the end of the horizontal lines.

Try these decorating techniques on some of our delicious cookies:

Eggnog Sugar Cookies
Gingerbread
Sugar cookies
Chai gingerbread cookie
Easy gingerbread tree

Get all of our holiday cookie recipes (100+!) here.