One our favorite traditions is baking Christmas cookies. I’m not even going to apologize for using the word “Christmas.” When the cookies are in the shapes of angels, Christmas trees, bells and reindeer, they are not holiday cookies – they are Christmas cookies.

I have a favorite sugar cookie recipe that I use. After letting the dough chill for a couple of hours it was time to roll it out cut out fun shapes.

Usually for convenience, we just use sprinkles which look fine after they’re baked.

This year, I decided we’d take it a step further and decorate the cookies after baking – with frosting or icing. The few times I’ve used the frosting from the grocery store, it’s turned into one big mess. Additionally, it’s just too sweet to eat with the sugar in the actual cookie and then gobs of frosting compounded together. I saw a post on Sally’s Baking Addiction with a link to an her favorite icing recipe from All Recipes. The pictures looked so pretty, I thought we’d give the icing recipe a whirl and see what happens.

The frosting recipe took no time and I had the ingredients on hand – including the food coloring.

It wasn’t messy and we invited our neighbor over to help decorate the cookies as well.

The best part was the icing could be spread on the cookies thinly, preventing the sugar overload. I also liked that I could make a small amount of icing for the number of cookies we baked. In fact, they were the best homemade sugar cookies, we’ve made to date. We ran out of sprinkles early on, but everyone got creative by mixing another color on top of the first layer of icing. My favorite is the purple and pink “Dr. Seuss” Christmas tree cookie below.