Easy Christmas Sugar Cookies

Instructions

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1. - Bake and Ice cookies 1-2 days ahead:
2. - Preheat oven to 350?.
3. - Cream butter and sugar in a large bowl with an electric or hand mixer until light and fluffy. Beat in egg, vanilla extract, and almond extract.
4. - In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture 1 cup at a time, mixing in between each cup.
5. - Divide the batter in two balls and set on a floured surface. Roll out each ball with a rolling pin to make each section about 12 inches in diameter and ? inch thick.
6. - Dip cookie cutter in flour before carefully cutting out each shape.
7. - Bake the cookies on an ungreased baking sheet for 8-11 minutes or until the cookies are lightly browned.
8. - Cool cookies on a cooling rack and cool completely.
9. - Prepare icing. Beat icing ingredients together until the icing becomes thick, shiny and smooth. 5-8 minutes at low speed with a heavy-duty mixer, 8-10 minutes at high speed with a handheld mixer.
10. -

    Tint Icing. Combine Brown and Lemon Yellow icing colors to get brown color shown. Combine Christmas Red and Red-Red to get red color shown.

    Tint ¼ cup icing black

    Tint ½ cup Kelly green

    Tint ½ cup oz. red using color combination provided

    Tint 1 cup brown using color combination provided.

    Reserve remaining icing white.

11. -

    Thin Icing. Thin black, green, brown, red, and ½ cup of white icing to a count of 20.

    Reserve ¼ cup full strength white icing.

12. -

    Decorate cookies. Prepare 5 decorating bags with tip 3. Fill bags separately with thinned icing. Outline and flood cookies as follows:

    Gingerbread man and woman: Outline and flood with brown icing.

    Bell: Outline and flood with red icing.

    Stocking: Outline and flood toe area with red icing

    Candy cane: outline and flood in every other stripe with red icing.

    Snowman: Outline and flood in body of snowman with white icing.

    Trees: outline and flood in with green icing. Immediately sprinkle with red, white and green jimmies or with white nonpareils.

    Reserve remaining thinned icing.

13. - After flooding your cookies, allow them to dry. The stocking and snowman cookies will need to dry for 4 hours. The Gingerbread man and woman, Bell, Candy Cane and Tree cookies will need to dry for 8 hours or overnight.
14. -

    After for 4 hours, finish decorating the stocking and snowman cookies as follows:

    Stocking: Using thinned white icing in bag with tip 3, outline and flood top of stocking. Sprinkle with white sparkling sugar while icing is wet.

    Snowman: Using thinned black icing, outline and flood brim of hat area. Let set 20-30 minutes. Outline and flood body of hat.

    Let stocking and snowman cookies dry for 8 hours or overnight.

Notes