How to Decorate Sugar Cookies

It can be difficult to get kids and adults to see eye to eye on a lot of things—bedtime, vegetables, brushing teeth. One thing they can both agree on, however, is just how delicious sugar cookies are! The melt-in-your-mouth treats are beloved by people of all ages, and their versatility makes them both a year-round and a Christmas time favorite. If you're wondering what makes sugar cookies so popular, we have some ideas. Not only can they be shaped however you like—round! snowflake! heart! tree! etc.—but fresh from the oven sugar cookies also provide you with a "blank canvas" that can be decorated in any delicious way you choose! One of our all-time favorite ways to decorate sugar cookies is by flooding them with royal icing. Want to try the technique for yourself? Start by baking up a batch of Food Network Magazine's basic sugar cookies and making around 2 1/4 cups worth of basic royal icing. Be sure to wait until the cookies have cooled completely before you begin decorating them, and cover the icing with a damp paper towel and plastic wrap until you're ready to use it; this'll prevent the icing from drying out. Click through the rest of this gallery to see more of our go-to sugar cookie decorating tips, tricks and favorite designs.

Photographs by Andrew Purcell

"Flooding" is a technique used to cover a cookie completely with royal icing. Here's how to do it:

Transfer about 1/2 cup of the royal icing to a resealable plastic bag and snip a small corner. Use this icing to pipe a thin border around the edge of each cookie. Let set for a few minutes. Thin the remaining icing with a few drops of water until it's the consistency of syrup.

Place half of the thinned icing in a resealable plastic bag and tint the rest with red and/or green gel food coloring. Transfer the colored icing to bags. Snip a corner of the white icing bag and pipe a generous amount inside the border of each cookie.

Using a small offset spatula or the back of a spoon, spread the icing to cover the cookie. Decorate with the colored icing while the white icing is still wet (click through gallery). Let the cookies set at room temperature, at least 1 hour.