Easy Christmas Sugar Cookies

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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.