Sugar cookies have always been a fantastic canvas for making decorative Christmas cookies. These colourful snowflakes, with their bright background colour and a lacy white design,  make for fancy little Christmas bites. Bake up a batch and place these sugar cookie snowflakes out when Christmas company comes calling.

 

Ingredients (80-90 1½” or 40mm cookies)

½ cup butter, at room temperature

¾ cup white sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla essence

1 ¾ cups flour

½ tsp baking powder

Pinch salt

3 cups royal icing

 

1. In a large bowl, mix the butter and sugar with an electric mixer for 4-5 minutes, until well combined.

2. Add the egg and vanilla, and mix for 2-3 minutes with the electric mixer – until smooth.

3. In another bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add it to the butter mixture and mix well.

4. Sprinkle some flour on your counter and lightly knead the dough for 20-30 seconds.

5. Form the dough into a ball, wrap with plastic or foil, and place in the refrigerator for 1 hour – to stiffen the dough.

6. Preheat oven to 375F (190c).

7. Sprinkle flour on your counter and roll the dough out to ¼” (5mm) thick.

8. Use a cookie cutter to cut out cookies. A star or flower shape makes good snowflakes (the cutter pictured here is a small cherry blossom cutter), but you can also make them on round cookies.

9. Place the cookies on a buttered and floured baking sheet.

10. Bake the cookies for 12-14 minutes – until the edges are just starting to slightly colour.

11. Let the sugar cookies cool for 1-2 minutes on the sheet and then transfer them to a cooling rack. Let cool completely.

12. Using a piping bag and a small round nozzle, pipe a border of royal icing around the edge of the cookie. Use the stiffer royal icing and colour it to match the flood colour. Allow the border to set for 1-2 hours.

13. After the border has set, use a thinner royal icing of the same colour to flood the top of the cookies. Spoon some of the icing on top of each cookie and let it spread.

14. Use the back of the spoon to spread the icing. Gently push the icing to flood as far as possible across the border icing, to give a smooth finish. Allow the surface to set for 30-60 minutes.

14. After the flood icing’s surface has set, use the piping bag and a small round nozzle to pipe snowflake designs with white icing on top of the flood icing.

Wait until the icing has hardened well before packing these cookies in a cookie tin.