Everyone can join in a cookie decorating party.
A cookie-decorating party can be planned for adults or children, and is an excuse to eat cookie dough right off your hands. A cookie-decorating party is also an excuse to spend time with visiting relatives during the holidays, to express your creative side, or as a way to make cherished memories with your children, any day of the year. Does this Spark an idea?
Everyday Cookies
If you're having an informal party and your main object is to spend time with friends and family, you can go with simple decorations. Start by making the cookies a little ahead of time. You can certainly go fancy if you want to, but plain cookies are versatile to decorate, and won't compete with the flavor of different toppings. Make a dozen cookies for each person.
To decorate, sprinkle confectioner's sugar through a paper doily or the slots or circles in a spatula to create patterns on a chocolate cookie. You can also make sugar cookies and blow food coloring across them with a straw for a psychedelic look.
Holiday Cookies
If yours is a holiday party, you can use cookie cutters to make seasonally-appropriate Christmas tree, turkey or shamrock shapes and decorate with icing of the appropriate color. However, you might also frost the cookie with white buttercream icing and dust sprinkles or colored sugar through a holiday stencil to achieve a pretty holiday stamp effect. Alternatively, you can roll the edges of round cookie dough in colored sanding sugar to give them a glittering edge after baking. For Christmas cookies, you and your guests can create Christmas cookie trees by coloring different-sized cookie stars with green icing and stacking them on top of one another, from largest to the smallest. Top the tree with a star tip, using green icing to glue it in place.
Children's Cookies
If your cookie-decorating party is for kids, there are several ways for the kids to help you decorate. Before the cookies are baked, you can make edible paint by mixing egg yolks with a variety of food colorings. The kids can then use small paintbrushes to paint their cookies before they're baked. Alternatively, you could bake one huge pizza cookie and let the kids help you apply toppings of strawberry jam, coconut flakes, chocolate chips and green glazed cherries.
Birthday Cookies
If your cookie decorating party is for a birthday, you can go a little more creative with your ideas to tailor the cookies to the birthday recipient. If the birthday boy is an avid retro gamer or sports fanatic, consider creating iced cookies shaped like arcade machines, game characters, baseballs or basketballs. You can create such complex patterns by piping the interior and exterior outlines in royal icing, and filling in the colors with thinned icing. You might make the decoration of these more complex cookies a group project, with one person responsible for each color or cookie segment. If you or your guests don't feel artistic enough to paint a complex design on the cookies, you can still draw designs on the dough using floured fork tines, letter stamps, cookie cutting wheels or knife edges.
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