How To Decorate Poinsettia Cookies With Puffy Royal Icing

Hey Besties! With Christmas just around the corner, it felt like the perfect time to create some beautiful poinsettia cookies with puffy royal icing! We’ll also compliment these with some gorgeous greenery using the brush embroidery technique. I share my cookie recipes, exactly how I make my royal icing along with tutorials and video so you can do this too! It’s simpler than you think, and I hope this inspires you to make your own poinsettias or other beautiful cookies using these techniques! Let’s go!

Recipes

First things first! You need a delicious canvas! Today’s poinsettia cookies were made with this peppermint cutout cookie recipe! Like all of our cutout cookie recipes, this dough is no-chill so it’s super quick to make. And no spread so they perfectly hold all your favorite shapes! I also love that you can make the peppermint flavor as subtle or as bold as you’d like. Soft, chewy and a fun flavor around the holidays!

But you know I always give you options! If you’re looking for our vanilla cutout cookie recipe or one of our other amazing flavors, you’ll find them all HERE! The hardest part is picking your fave!

If you’re looking for a fabulous royal icing recipe, you’ll find exactly how we make our icing HERE. It’s very simple to make but the magic is in the method! So, make sure you follow the simple instructions to achieve this perfect royal icing. This recipe gives us the most beautiful, puffy icing without any cratering, color bleed or other issues. We LOVE it.

Royal Icing Consistencies

The hardest part of cookie decorating – consistencies! But trust me, the more time you spend playing with icing, the easier it gets. And I have tutorials, with videos, to help along the way! For these cookies, we used just two consistencies: a flood consistency and our puffy icing consistency. I started with round cookies simply flooded white. If you’re looking for guidance on flooding, our Flooding 101 tutorial is very popular! It includes a detailed video so you can learn exactly how to flood cookies beautifully.

And for the rest of our decorating, I am using our puffy icing consistency, which I also have a detailed tutorial for. You can find it HERE. This icing is thicker and requires light scribing to perfect. It is this consistency that gives great puff, dimension and shape to the designs.

Every cookie I make also spends time in our dehydrator to lock in the puff, give great sheen, avoid any craters and speed up the decorating process. If using a dehydrator for decorating is new to you, THIS post will tell you everything you need to know. A dehydrator is a tool I believe every decorator should have. It’s the simplest way to make a huge improvement in your royal icing.

Decorating techniques

Once my cookies were flooded, and in this case, the flood was completely dry, I used simple piping and flooding to create each section of the flower. Make sure to let your sections crust before adding an adjacent section, or they will run together. This is also where the dehydrator really helps to quick set your icing and speed up the process. I used the same puffy icing consistency to pipe and decorate the poinsettia cookies.

For the greenery, you’re going to use a small decorating brush to create the leaf shape and details. It works best to have a slightly moistened brush. This is what is called brush embroidery and is a very fun and forgiving technique. You can see some additional examples and tutorials HERE and HERE.

And as you’ll see in the decorating video, it’s important to trust the process! Sometimes (often times), your designs will look wonky early on. But keep going, you’re creating art, and it almost always turns into something beautiful in the end. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still delicious!

Decorating Video

Let’s see it all in action! You can find the decorating video for these poinsettia cookies and greenery HERE! I hope this is helpful and inspiring for you this holiday season!

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