Decorating Cookies

Cookies are something that most kids will gladly eat. Most adults will also eat cookies as well. While eating cookies makes your mouth happy, it doesn’t really take much time to do. If you want to enjoy cookies, then including the actual making of the cookies as part of that will lead to far less cookies eaten (probably). Baking and decorating cookies is a fun activity that your kids will enjoy doing.

Have your kids help you in the kitchen as they can, regardless of what you are making. The earlier that kids are introduced to the kitchen the more likely they will be to make meals later on.  Cookies are a fun way for them to learn how to help in the kitchen and then receive a tasty treat afterwards. As long as you’re not making cookies everyday, then having a cookie every now and then won’t hurt your kids.

Generally, decorating cookies involves sugar cookies or some other basic cookie type that is smooth on the top. Find your favorite sugar cookie recipe and make it with your kids. This will usually take about an hour to make and bake the cookies - eating cookie dough while waiting is one of the highlights of making cookies. Try not to eat too much of the raw dough or else your stomach will not be happy afterwards. 

Once the cookies have cooled off you're ready to decorate them. What should you use for decorations? Whatever you want. You’ll need frosting, sprinkles, and other simple decorations. Your local grocery store will have an entire section dedicated to cake and cookie decorations. We’d recommend that you take your kids with you to pick out a few items that they’d like to put on their cookies.

If you use a plain white frosting for your cookies, then you can use food coloring to have several different colors of frosting on the top of your cookies. The downside is that all of your cookies will taste the same - some of us really like a chocolate flavored frosting on the top of our cookies. Your kids likely won’t care too much though, so we’d recommend going with a frosting that you can add food coloring to make different colors.

If you’re really feeling ambitious, then making your own frosting is also an option. You’re going to really find out how unhealthy frosting is if you’ve never made it before. Frosting is basically just butter and sugar in huge amounts mixed together. If you’re making cream cheese frosting (yum!) then you’re adding that as well, but not much else. Regardless of making your own or not, frosting is not healthy and thus absolutely delicious. We don’t recommend making cookies every week.

Once you’ve got the frosting on your cookies, it’s time to add sprinkles and whatever else your kids chose at the store to put on top. We also like to use the little frosting tubes they sell in order to write or draw on the top of the cookies as well. Let your kids build out whatever they want on the top of the cookies. Things may get a little messy with all of the sprinkles, but that’s part of the fun.

Decorating cookies is a lot of fun and very tasty with all of the sugar you’ll be consuming. Make this an activity that you do a few times a year as kids and adults really enjoy it.