We are having a cookie exchange and judging as one part of our month-long Christmas extravaganza at work.  I don’t recall ever doing one at the office before and I’m planning on blowing the competition away! Christmas is the best time to make iced sugar cookies and I have chosen a simple star/snowflake design.

We will be judged on appearance and taste so I decided to go with the traditional Wilton sugar cookie recipe.  You can’t go wrong with it and the touch of almond extract coupled with real butter makes them delectable.  I used the small batch recipe for these cookies and it yielded 24 1/4 inch cookies.  If you would like to make a lot of cookies, you can use their large batch recipe.

I was first inspired to decorate sugar cookies by my neighbor, Jennifer Strittmatter.  She gave us some for Christmas one year and they were beautiful and tasty.  Over the next year, I perfected my technique through all of the holidays and ended up decorating about 5 dozen cookies that Christmas.

There is something calming about decorating and creating.  It calms the nerves and allows me to spend time in right-brain activities.  I spend so much time with my left brain for work, I need the reprieve.  In contrast to some of the work I do, decorating cookies allows me to actually finish something and be proud of my end product.

The whole process of making and decorating can take me several days.  My Easter batch took me three days to make.  I bake the cookies on the first day, do the base color on the 2nd and then finish off with the embellishments on the 3rd.  I took 2 days for this batch and ended up baking and doing the base coat icing all in the same day.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for my next post about the Christmas goodies I’m giving out this year…