Homemade Sugar Cookies for Any Holiday
An Idea for Many Holidays
Children love to decorate cookies at every holiday, not just at Christmas time.
- On Valentine's Day, you can make hearts decorated with pink frosting and sprinkles.
- On St. Patrick's Day, decorate four leaf clovers with green frosting with green sprinkles.
- At Easter, they can decorate egg shaped cookies and decorate in pastels and mini jellybeans and coconut.
- For the Fourth of July or Memorial day, you can cut out and bake stars to decorate or rectangles to be decorated into flags.
- For Halloween, cut out pumpkins, tombstones, moons, and bats to decorate with orange and black frosting and sprinkles.
- And, of course on Christmas, the usual Christmas shapes can be decorated with the colors of Christmas.
Cookies--The Holiday Craft You Can Eat
If you have been looking for a craft for children to do during the holidays, there is nothing like decorated sugar cookies. Children love the decorating process and eating their creations afterwards.
My twelve-year-old daughter is the only child I have at home, and I don't have any grandchildren so we invited a friend's children over to decorate cookies.
I baked the cookies ahead of time so that the children did not have to wait for the cookies to bake before they could begin their art work.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup soft shortening
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 1.4 cup all purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
Instructions
- With a mixer, beat together shortening, sugar, egg, milk, and vanilla
- Sift, then add flour, baking powder, and salt
- Chill dough for one hour
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees, lightly grease cookie sheets
- Roll dough out thinly and evenly on waxed paper
- Cut dough into desired shapes
- Place onto lightly greased cookie sheets
- Bake for 10-15 minutes until cookies are lightly browned.
Creating Eatable Art
Once the cookies are baked and cooled, they are ready for decorating. I made my cookies well ahead of the time the children were scheduled to decorate them so that the children wouldn't have to wait to begin their crafting.
I put the plate of cookies to be decorated on the table along with premade frosting. Some of the frosting was left white, but some I colored with food coloring. Also I had cake decorating tubes with cake decorating tips available. I also had shaker containers filled with sprinkles to finish the cookies.
If you do not have cake decorating tubes, you can use plastic bags with a corner cut out of them and tips inserted int the corner. Fill the tube with frosting and squeeze as you would cake decorating tubes.
I had children sit around the table and allowed them to work on decorating their own cookies.
After they decorated the cookies and I allowed each of the children to eat their first piece of "art".
Because each child decorated more than one cookie, I allowed children to take cookies home to share with family members.
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© 2013 Cygnet Brown
