Simple Decorated Christmas Cookies

Hey everyone! Welcome back to another tutorial. It's Stephanie here from Little Cookie Co. and I've got a great video of six different designs, very easy ones, that will impress anybody around the holidays and Christmas season. I've got my tipless bags, a pair of sharp scissors and a scribe tool and I've also made my colors here and I have outline and flood consistency in each color, except for the black. If you need help on your consistencies, I'll link my video below on that and you can check it out. Okay, so first things first, I'm going to do the jingle bell cookie. So I have my yellow outline consistency here. I'm going to touch down and slowly lift the bag up and go around the circle. Try to, if you're too scared to go too close to the edges, you don't have to go all the way to the edge. You can go a little bit more inside of the cookie. When you get a little bit better, it'll get easier. And we're going to go ahead and flood our cookie. So when we start flooding, I go slowly around the edge and I go as closest to the outline, almost over the outline, if I can, just to cover it a bit. And then as I work my way inside, I can put a little bit more pressure on the bag and go a little bit faster. I go slow on the outside just to keep control and not to pour the icing over the outline. And then you can see I pick up my speed a little bit and I put a little bit more pressure just to go a little bit faster. If you're, if you cut your hole too big or too small, you can adjust it at this point. If it's too big, your icing will flow way too fast. If it's too small, it probably will take you a little bit longer to flood. And then once you are finished flooding, you can grab your scribe tool. I sort of poke it in my cookie sometimes and just sort of wiggle it, or you can just run your scribe through it to smooth out the icing. And then we're going to put it to dry for a few seconds. So now that it's sort of crested over, I'd let it dry for, you know, 10 to 15 minutes in my dehydrator. If you don't have one, you can use a fan. And then I'm just going to use my black outline consistency here and mark a couple of lines here for the bottom of the bell. And then again, with the same piping bag, I'm just going to do a few dots. So what I want to do is pipe the outline of the top here, and then I'm going to pipe the middle. I'm using my outline consistency here. You can see it's a little bit thicker, so I'm sort of wiggling my bag as I go, and it sort of smooths out the icing. The reason I'm using my outline consistency, it's a very small area, so it's easier to smooth out, and I don't want it to crater in. So having my base only crested over, not fully dry, and using my outline consistency on top, this will prevent the craters from happening. And then if you have a fan or a dehydrator, any food dehydrator works, you can use that. If not, just let them make sure that they are on the counter with air circulation. Don't cover them so that they dry fully. And then you've got your jingle bell. So that's our first design. You can put this aside and let it dry, ideally overnight, to make sure that it's fully dry, that you can handle it tomorrow, and you won't have any issues. For our next cookie, we're going to be making a present. So we're going to do the same thing. We're going to go ahead and outline the cookie. Again, I've cut in a small tip. If you go too small and your outline is really thin and small, what will happen is your flood could potentially leak over the edge. So I do like to do thicker outline, especially if you're sort of newer to this, you can do a thicker outline. That way, if you're not sure about the control of the piping bag and the pressure and your consistency, it gives you a little extra security. I do like to dry my outline because sometimes if it's wet, it sticks to the flood. So I did put it aside for a few minutes and work on the other cookies. And then I'll bring it back and flood over. You can do it wet if you want, and it kind of, you can wiggle it into the outline, but I prefer to have it dry. It keeps in my flood a lot better. So again, I go slowly around the edges. And as I work inward, I can go faster and put a little bit more pressure on the bag so that it comes out faster because we're all impatient, let's be honest, right? So again, you can wiggle your cookie or you can fill in with your scribe, fill in the holes and sort of just run your scribe. Here, my outline was a little bit thinner than I wanted it to be here. So you can see that my flood was kind of coming over the edge. So I just clean it up a bit. So now I'm going to grab my white, and this is my white flood consistency. And while the cookie is still wet, the red icing is still wet. We're going to add dots to it. So this is called the wet on wet. And what it does is that when you do it while the base layer is still wet and freshly flooded, the white actually melts into the red. And so it'll create an even surface. So we're not piping dots on top of the red. We're basically doing it inside. So I've let this dry a little bit. And again, I've let it crust over. So if I poke my finger through it, it will dent in, but it's it's crusted over enough that I can pipe the next layer. So here I'm just going to pipe two straight lines. And every time I pipe, I touch down and I lift my bag up a little bit. And then I touch back down to the point where I want it to stop. When you lift your bag up, what happens is your line comes out smoother. So I'm just going to do all the outlines. This is my green outline consistency. And so once I'm finished outlining the sort of ribbon of the present with the same consistency, my outline consistency, I'm going to fill it in. So what I usually do is I always work with two consistencies. But when I have smaller areas like this, I just use my outline consistency. If it's really super thick, then you'd see the sort of you'd see the way that I piped it. But if it's not super thick outline, you can sort of smooth it out like I am here. You can see it already sort of smoothed itself out. But if it needs a little bit of help, I sort of wiggle it through or while I'm piping, I sort of just pile up the icing there and sort of wiggle my bag while I'm piping and it smooths it out. So I'm going to put this aside for now and let it crust over and dry a little bit and then we'll come back and do the details of the ribbon. So just remember, anytime we do sort of layers on top of layers, you want to make sure that your bottom layers crusted over a little bit dry. So go ahead and pipe like triangle shapes. And those will be our ribbon, the top of the bowl. And again, I'm using my my outline consistency and I'm just doing I'm not doing an outline and letting it dry. I'm just doing a border and filling it in right away and then using my scribe to perfect the shape. Your scribe is an amazing tool that helps so much. You know, you can do so many things with it and it's a really good mistake fixer or helper, I guess. So you can see like my my bows aren't perfect, but I just, you know, or ribbon isn't perfect. I can just fix it up with my scribe and it gets to those little points perfectly. And then we're just going to add, you know, your two bottom pieces of the ribbon and same thing again, I'm just outlining and filling in right away and just using my scribe to sort of fill it out. You can see that half of it's on the red part, half is on the green, but the flood, sorry, the icing consistency is thick enough and it will just sort of settle itself. So whatever's underneath can be bumpy and the top looks nice and smooth. We're just going to set that aside to dry for a little bit and we'll come back and do the last detail on this one. OK, so now I'm grabbing my outline consistently again and an easy way to do the definition of the bows is you basically do sort of a teardrop shape on the top and then outline the rest of the bow. And so that sort of makes it look that 3D bow shape. So I do that on both sides. And if you need to use your scribe, if your outline, you know, broke or something, you can just connect it together. And again, I'm just doing a little sort of tear shape, you know, raindrop on the very top there to give sort of that loop bow effect. And then I'm outlining the rest of the bow. And then I'll go ahead and outline the bottom two ribbons as well. And then once I'm done that, I will go ahead and put a big amount of icing in the middle and wiggle it just to make the center of the bow. And then that will be our present cookie and we can set aside to dry. I'm going to show you guys how to do a cut in our tipless bags in case you didn't know. So here I have my next color that I'll be using my white icing and I'm going to flatten the tip of the bag with the seam in the middle facing up and just cut across with my sharp scissors. Always start small because you can always cut bigger if you need to. So what I usually do is test on my icing. I'll draw a line or two. And if it's OK, then I'll go. I sort of know how big I want the holes now and I'm used to cutting it. But if you're not, you can always test it out on a piece of paper towel or something to see how big your outline is. And if it's too small, you can always cut it bigger. If your icing is starting to curl out of your bag or doesn't come sort of, you have to put a lot of pressure on it, then you might want to cut the hole bigger. So here I've done my outline again. I'm going to let it dry for a couple of minutes. Now that it's dry, I'm going to go in with my flood icing. And you guys can see that with consistency, it's hard to know in the beginning how thin, how thick your icing should be. When I'm doing smaller cookies, these are hard, hard to tell, but they're a little bit smaller than my average cookie. And so if I have a really loose flood, it's easy for a lot of the flood to come out of the bag at once. And so what happens is you over flood your cookie and it runs off the edge. So when I have smaller cookies, I tend to go a tad thicker on my flood because it's a smaller area. I can flood it faster and then I can wiggle it and shake the cookie smooth. Whereas if it's a bigger cookie, by the time you get to the middle flood section, your outsides may start drying and it's harder to smooth out. And so here we have our milk cookie. So I flooded it white. Now that the flood is crested over, I can go ahead and pipe my letters. And so I'm just going to write milk with my black outline consistency. And you can see if you have any breakages in the in the icing flow, that's usually like an air bubble or something. So you just go in with a scribe and fix it. And I'm just free handing and I'm trying to just make sure that all the letters are the same size. So I'm starting on the top and trying to line up each top and bottom of the letters. And again, to make it smooth, I touch down my bag, I lift it up and I touch back down when the line is done. That will give me a smooth line. This one's a pretty simple one, but it's pretty cute too, especially when you have the chocolate chip cookie to go with it. OK, so our next one, you can't have milk without cookies. So we are going to make a chocolate chip cookie. OK, here my icing didn't come out properly. It sort of bubbled up and didn't continue. So I'm just going to scrape it off my scribe and restart again. So I'm going to touch down and put some pressure on an outline. So for this one, we're actually just going to use our outline consistency for the whole cookie because I want some texture to my cookie so that it looks like an actual chocolate chip cookie. So we don't need flood for this one. And what we're going to do is just fill up the cookie here. I'm not waiting for my outline to dry either. I'm just filling it up right away. I did the outline just to get that general round shape and to sort of keep that thicker icing in. But I'm just going to go in and make sure I get it close to the outline there and then just fill up my cookie. Now, depending how thick or thin your icing, your outline icing is, you can see here that mine is starting to settle into itself. And I do want some texture. I don't want it to eventually just even out flat or almost flat. So I'm going to fill it up here and I'm just going to keep playing with it with my scribe once I've filled enough icing in there just to keep giving it texture. Mine was a little bit looser than I wanted. And so I'm going to play with it and then see if it still keeps melting into itself. I'll leave it for a minute or so to let it start to dry or keep shape. And then I'll go back in with my scribe and make little marks. You can see like right now it's sort of melting. It's losing its losing the details to it that I've made. And here I put a little bit too much icing. So I'm just going to run my scribe around it just to get the icing, because if I leave it, it might flow right off the cookie down the side. So again, you can just use your scribe vertically beside the cookie to clean it up. So it's not keeping the little marks that I'm making in with my scribe. So I put it off to the side for a minute or so. And I'm going to come back to it now and again, just start poking it and playing around with my scribe until I'm happy that it's keeping the little marks and peaks in there to make it look like a chocolate chip cookie. So once my base has dried or crusted over, I can add the chocolate chips to it. So I've got my black icing here. If you want to add real chocolate chips, you can before it dries. You have to put them in the icing so that they stick to it. But here I just have icing and I'm just going to put a few dots on it and I've got my outline consistency so that it doesn't puddle. And that's it. And we're done for the chocolate chip cookie. All right. So our next cookie is a Christmas tree. I think this one is super cute, too. And so we're going to do the base blue. You can pick any color you want, and we're going to do the same thing. We're going to outline the cookie. If you can't outline a circle very well or you outline it, it doesn't look like a perfect circle. Don't worry about it. Circles are really hard to outline. I hate doing them, but they're a good handy shape to have. But they never come out perfectly circle. So if you can, good for you. If you can't, don't worry about it. Once the design is on, nobody will notice. So I've outlined, let it dry. Now I'm going to my flood. And so here again, we don't put too much pressure on the bag on the outside, because if you go too close to your line with too much pressure, you might flood over the outline and it might drip over the side of the cookie. And then when I get inside, I can go a little bit more faster and be a little bit more clumsy with more pressure because the flood is on the inside. So it's just towards the edges. You want to be careful. So I'm going to do the star first. So I'm just going to put my outline consistency yellow icing and I'm just going to use my scribe here to pull out four points to make sort of like a star on top of the tree. And so if you use your flood here and you try to do this, sometimes your flood is too loose and it'll just sort of melt into a ball. So that's why I'm using my outline consistency, which is stiffer, so it holds its shape a lot better. And then once you're done the star, I'm going to grab my green outline consistency and I'm just going to start from the top, touch down and just zigzag across. And each zigzag, I'm lifting up my piping bag a little bit and sort of starting to curves back and forth. Just make sure you touch down and you lift up and then you touch back down when you're done. Now we're going to do the string of the light. So I've got my black outline and I'm going to pipe from one side to the other. And just remember, touch down when you're changing directions or when you want to stop so that the icing sticks to the cookie and we lift up in between to get a nice smooth line. And then here I'm using my outline consistency, my thicker icing, and I'm just going to put a few dots and I'm going to spread them out. So I'll do all my red lights first and then I'll go back in with my green and my yellow. You can pick whichever lights you want or colors you want. And some can be facing up, some can be facing down so that it looks like a natural string of lights, Christmas lights. Okay guys, that brings us to the end of the video. I hope you enjoyed watching and learning how to make these simple Christmas cookies and I hope you guys give it a try this Christmas season and let me know if you do below and we'll see you in the next video. Thank you. Happy baking!