Easy Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing

This Easy to make Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing recipe is perfect for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas!

This is the perfect time of year to make Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing for Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I picked up some really cool Halloween cookie cutters recently and I was dying to give them a shot.

If you bake often, you already know how easy it is to make sugar cookies. It almost always consists of sugar, flour, butter, eggs, vanilla and sometimes a couple of other ingredients.

This sugar cookie recipe is pretty simple to make but it does require the dough to be chilled for 3 to 4 hours before you can roll it out and cut your cookies. I'm just pointing this out so you can plan ahead. No instant gratification here!

I must warn you that I am not an artist. Decorating your cookies does require some skill. I recommend practicing before you decorate the final product. Since this cookie recipe makes a couple of dozen cookies I usually pick the one I like the least and practice my piping on it before doing the rest of them.

So many factors come into play for achieving the perfect-looking sugar cookie. The consistency of the Royal Icing, the piping, the flooding as well as the color of the icing. This is definitely one of those practice makes perfect type of recipes.

💭 Recipe Tip

Make sure you sift the flour as indicated on the recipe card. If you don't sift the flour beforehand you will be using too much flour and will not achieve the proper consistency for these sugar cookies.

For more of my great cookie recipes check out my Cookie Jar. Especially my Crunchy Coconut Crisp Cookies or Codi’s Favorite M&M Cookies. Yummy!

📋 Gather your Ingredients

You will need the following ingredients to make this Sugar Cookie with Royal Icing recipe (see recipe card for quantities): Unsalted Butter, White Sugar, Eggs, Vanilla Extract, Salt, All Purpose Flour, Powdered Sugar, Meringue Powder, Water and Food Coloring Paste.

🥣 How to Make Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing

In a mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar. Add beaten egg. Add remaining ingredients.
Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for 3 to 4 hours.
Preheat oven to 350°F
Roll out dough on a floured surface to ¼ inch thick.
Cut the dough with your favorite cookie cutters.
Place cut cookies on a parchment-lined baking sheet.
Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until cookies are light-colored.

🥣 How to Make Royal Icing

In a mixing bowl, combine the first 3 ingredients and mix on medium speed for 5 minutes. You are looking for a consistency like honey or toothpaste.

🥣 How to Decorate Sugar Cookies

This is the hard part of this recipe. You will want to divide your white royal icing into separate containers, one for each color you will be using. Add the necessary amount of food coloring to each bowl to achieve the desired color.

Use a #1 or #2 tip to outline each cookie with royal icing. Add a little bit of water to thin the icing out a bit. Fill the center of each cookie. Use a toothpick to smooth out any imperfections.