Christmas Cookie Decoration

• Prepared sugar cookie icing
• A toothpick, chopstick or clean (never used) paint brush for spreading the icing
• Rolling pin
• Parchment paper and plastic wrap (optional, but helpful)
• Flour for rolling cookies
• Cookie cutters
• Colored sugar, sprinkles, gel icing, food coloring
• To make it easy to roll out the sugar cookie dough, tear off a large sheet of parchment paper. Sprinkle a little flour on top. Put the Christmas cookie dough on top of the flour and lay a sheet of plastic wrap over the dough. Now roll out the dough between the parchment paper and the plastic wrap to a thickness of 1/4-inch. This not only keeps the dough from sticking to the rolling pin, but is also easier to clean up!
• Peel the plastic wrap off the dough. Dip the cookie cutters in flour, and cut out cookies.
• Place the cut-out cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet, leaving about 2 inches between each cookie. Bake cookies as directed in Christmas cookie recipe. IMPORTANT: Let the cookies cool completely, at least 1 hour, before decorating.
• If you haven't already done so, prepare your sugar cookie icing. Take a gallon-size plastic bag and fold the edges over your hand. Spoon the prepared sugar cookie icing into the bag, pressing icing down to one of the bottom corners. Cut off the tip of the bottom corner. This is your pastry bag for decorating your Christmas cookies.
• Pipe a border of sugar cookie icing around the edges of the sugar cookies
• Now pipe more sugar cookie icing onto the center of the cookies, and use a toothpick, clean (NEVER USED) paint brush, or chopstick to spread the icing all over the cookie.
• Professional bakers call this technique "flooding the cookies." Actually, they use an icing with a slightly thicker consistency for the border, then a thinner icing for the middle of the cookie, and they use professional pastry bags with different tips for the border and center of the cookie.
• Add colored sugar or sprinkles to your cookies. If you want to make a pattern with another color of icing, wait an hour for the first layer of icing to dry completely. Then mix a small portion of sugar cookie icing with food coloring in a separate bowl. Spoon the icing into a clean plastic bag, cut off the bottom tip, and pipe the colored icing onto the cookies in any pattern you desire. You can also use gel icing to add more decoration to the cookies. Gel icing comes in lots of different colors and textures (there's even sparkly gel icing), and it's already in ready-to-use tubes.