Christmas Cookies for Beginners (Winter Wonderland Theme)

Hello and welcome to my Christmas winter wonderland set. I'm going to walk you through step by step on how to make these beautiful cookies. Okay so we're going to start with our stocking cookie. So I'm going to touch down my outline consistency here and every time there's a little bit of a turn or a corner I get really close to my cookie or I touch down if it's a little bit of a corner. If it's a smooth corner I try not to touch down if I can. Sometimes your icing is not going the right way so you can touch down that's okay. It doesn't have to be perfect. And once I let my outline dry for a few minutes I'm going to come back and flood and I'm trying to get my flood right up against that outline. If I can cover it a little bit that's what I'm going for. You can always use your scribe to pull that icing on top of your outline to hide it a tiny bit if it bothers you. And what we're going to do is once I'm done with this top here flood I'm going to let it dry and crust over really well because what we're going to do now is once it's dry enough that I can touch it we're going to go ahead and put some flood icing on it and gently I'm going to dab my icing around. So this is my flood because it's easier to kind of dab and spread around the cookie. Now if your flood is getting as you're dabbing it and it's kind of just melting away and it's not giving you too much texture just keep going at it and if you're still not getting enough let it sit for you know 30-40 seconds and come back with your brush. Once it starts to dry up a little bit it'll give you more texture and this is kind of that fuzzy looking top of the sock that we're looking for. You want to make sure that your base is really well and dry, dry enough that you can do this step without poking the icing through. If your icing is just crusted over but wet underneath and you're going a little bit too hard with the brush you might poke right through your icing. So this step you want to maybe do this first, this step of the cookie, do all the other decorating you need to do and then come back to this cookie later. Once you're happy with how it looks you can go on to the boot part. So here I'm going to start my outline and I had a little bit of icing on my tip there that just wasn't you know I don't like to have it too much hanging out it won't secure to the cookie so I just wiped it off on my cookie. I'll hide it with my flood no big deal. Usually I wipe it off with my paper towel but the cookie works as well. So anytime I have a big curve I'm trying to not touch down just to get a nice smooth line. Again if you have to in the middle of the curve it's not a big deal but the goal is to get those smooth nice round edges. Anytime I have a sharp corner I can touch down to change direction it's much easier but when you don't whenever you have a nice long curve then you try to go the whole way without touching down. And then we're going to go in and flood and again I'm trying to get up right up over that outline and if you can't it's okay you know with the first set of cookies it's kind of hard to get all these little details but as you get better and better those are the kind of things that make your cookies look a little bit more professional and sort of you know put together is the details like covering your outline getting your outline all the way to the edge but if you're a beginner and this is your first set of cookies or you've only done it a few times it doesn't have to be like that you know focus on getting your consistency right those are the most important things in the beginning the rest will come naturally. Okay now we're going to add a little detail to the stocking here and I'm just going to keep my bag in one spot and put pressure on to get a ball there of icing and pull down so I'm going to put pressure in one spot and pull down as I lighten up the pressure. Pressure pull down pressure pull down and like that we've got our little holly leaves and I'm going to take my outline red consistency and make three little dots and the green was outline consistency as well and we're going to set this aside for a little while for the green to crust over and now once it's ready I'm just going to add a little bit of detail here so I'm going to add three dots and just do it throughout the bottom of the stocking. I'm trying to space them out as evenly as possible not always so even but we go with it and there you go you have your cute little stocking I love it it looks amazing for Christmas and it's pretty simple one to do. Okay next up we have our door cookie so here I'm going to touch down I'm focusing on the next corner and I'm going to touch down on the next corner that's my goal is to touch down lift up my piping bag and I'm focusing on the next corner not where my icing necessarily is landing but where I'm going to get to because that's where I want to touch down that will give me the straightest line always look a little bit ahead of where you're piping and focus on where you want to touch down again if it's easier for you to turn the cookie every time you do a line you can go ahead and do that here my icing line broke so either you can continue piping the line if you want or sometimes I like to just scrape it off and start from the beginning again that gives me a nice clean line sometimes when your line breaks right in the middle it's hard to continue a straight line and because I want this to be nice and straight because it's a door then I'm going to go in and just you know retry that line again okay once I'm happy with my outline I'm going to go ahead and flood so I always start my flood a little bit in from the outline and the reason being is if your flood is really loose or you the hole in your bag is a little bit too big and this is your first cookie you're flooding even if it's not my first cookie I tend to do this then I get a feel for how much flood is actually coming out sometimes when you flip your bag over to go and flood and by the time you get to the cookie a little bit of icing is already starting to come out of the bag so then when you go to put a little bit of pressure on it and start flooding it ends up being a lot more icing than you want in that one spot and if you're right up close to the outline you may end up flooding right over the outline and over the side of the cookie so I like to start a little bit inwards and then see how my pressure is and then go ahead and start closer to my outline if my flood is a little bit on the looser side I don't worry about flooding exactly you know perfectly and not leaving any gaps and the looser my flood actually the more gaps I leave because if it's really runny I don't want to overfill that area it tends to seep over the side of the cookie if it's too runny so that's why sometimes I have gaps there but we it all fills in with the scribe okay so once my flood base is dry we want it pretty dry at this stage I'm using a bigger tip I have you can use anything round that's nice small and round that you can use and I'm going to scrape around the tip here just to make an indent or a mark of where I want the wreath to be it'll just be a rough guideline so I know when I'm piping my wreath that I'm staying in the middle of the cookie and that I know where to go and make it centered you won't see the lines I've scraped in in the video and you won't see them after either when I pipe over top of them but it's just a rough guideline for myself because I can't free pipe a circle very well and so here I'm going to do some of the details of the doors so for nice straight lines again I want to focus on where I touch down and start to where I'm ending especially these small short lines and I touch down and I go straight across and I'm focusing when I want to end and because I'm doing that I'm going to get a nice straight line if I'm worried too much about what's going on the middle then I might come out with a wiggly line because I'm focusing too much so just point a to point b and it's almost like pulling a string if you hold the string at one end and you pull it at the other end the string will naturally straighten itself so that's what I'm doing with a string of icing touching down and kind of pulling it straight to the second point I'm taking my time whichever way it's easier if you want to do you know the squares one way at the top ones I did top and bottom first now the bottom ones I'm going to do a different way just whatever you feel comfortable if you need to turn your cookie you know every time that you do a different line if you're comfortable piping left to right all the time go ahead and turn your cookie to make sure that you're always piping that way always do whatever makes you feel more comfortable piping whatever makes it easier for you it doesn't have to be exactly the way that I do it and every time you want a nice sharp corner you do want to touch your piping bag down and that'll give you the next corner and so now I'm going to go a little bit inward from each box and do a second small box and again I'm focusing on where I need to go because these are smaller areas I don't want to lift my piping bag up too much I'm staying really close to the cookie especially on the top and bottom lines it's a very short distance so if you lift up your bag too far by the time you touch your bag down your piping line might be too long so you want to stay really close so that when you're lowering bag to touch down again at the end of the line you'll know exactly where your icing will stop and once we finish this detail we want to let it dry because we will be piping our wreath on top of the top squares so we want to make sure that it's dry enough that when we're piping our wreath it's not going to move around or break the icing so here I have my outline green consistency so it's a thicker consistency and the reason I want thick is I want it to keep the shape that I'm piping and I have two different greens I have a lighter green and a darker green I'll link all the colors below in the video and here I'm just doing two sets of greenery so the first one was some pressure piping putting pressure dragging the bag and now this one I'm just drawing small lines they don't have to be perfect they don't have to be you know perfectly symmetrical just keep layering them on I usually do one layer and then I'll pipe on top and because it's thick icing we can do this all kind of at the same time we don't have to let one layer dry because it dries pretty quick and it won't get messed up too much if we're piping on top so I'm going to alternate between the two colors in here I'm just putting pressure in one spot and then dragging my bag down putting pressure and then letting go of the pressure and dragging it down and that's how I'm getting those leaves and I'm trying to follow as best I can that circle that I scraped in it's hard to see in the video but it's going to be my guide so I'm going to try to stay on that as much as possible and again going in with the thicker icing you can either do v's or you can do lines on one side and then lines on the other side here sometimes it's hard when you're doing a v to keep with a line so first I want to get all all my lines in there so I'm following that circle and notice I've turned my cookie for these type especially like the pressure piping ones the lighter green it's really hard to do at a different angle so for me I find it easier if I turn the cookie as I go and again I'm just layering the lines up takes a little bit of time so I'm putting just enough pressure to get the icing out of the bag if you squeeze really hard and you have a small hole this is a pretty small hole in my bag so if I squeeze super hard it's going to just come out and be wiggly like the line will not come out straight so what I want to do is just put a tiny pressure secure that icing on the cookie and then get that line in there touch down and break it off the same thing with pressure piping I'm putting pressure and then moving the bag and as you get the rhythm of it you can kind of go in a v and you can always practice this on a paper towel you don't have to go like give this your first try on your cookie I usually have a paper towel with me especially when I'm doing greenery and stuff like this I'll test out my bag a few times make sure I feel comfortable with it I'll make sure the hole is big enough or not too big if you're putting pressure and your hole is really big and you're getting this massive amount of icing coming out then it's probably best to just get a new bag cut a smaller hole that way you have control of how much icing is coming out you can see here I'm doing these now with the dark icing I don't know I change it up sometimes whatever is kind of comfortable whatever works sometimes you try different things out and see you know if it's working if it's not working I like these things they take a little bit of time for the detail but they come together so nicely and they don't have to be perfect my lines aren't perfect like sometimes my lines don't even stick to the cookie there I just wipe it off and keep going but as you layer them on and you add a tiny little detail here and there it just looks so good and that's what I love about it you don't have to be perfect you don't have to get it just right it just seems to come together at the end and you know these cookies I never thought that I would be able to make these you know fancy kind of in style cookies but they're quite simple when you break it down like this and every time I don't like something or it doesn't look right to me I just keep layering stuff on and it just comes together somehow so here you know I just look it looks a little empty like it didn't connect right so again I'm just going to layer on top a little bit it just it didn't sit right with me that it didn't fill in the wreath the green the darker green was so much more thicker and nicer so just going to go over it and pipe and you know you can add some in the middle down the line you can add a little bit more there it really like I said if you don't are not happy with it just keep layering and kind of adding a little bit of detail here and there and it sort of comes together you do it until you're happy you know if it doesn't take you that many layers that's awesome if you know you just something's not right just keep giving it a few lines here and there add a little bit of depth and it really takes that cookie to the next level and brings it all together okay so now that I've layered up a little bit more on wreath here and I feel confident that it looks pretty good I have one more section just to thicken up here so it blends in with the rest of the wreath and I'm just sort of piping on top of the other greenery just just going in there it doesn't you know if you look inspected this really closely probably doesn't look that clean guarantee nobody's going to be looking that close at your cookies they're probably look at them be wowed and then taste them and be really happy with them so the finishing touch is going to be our holly or little berries here and so I've got my red outline consistency and I like to do little groups of threes and I'm just randomly placing them here wherever I think they're going to look good I think it really brings out the wreath and makes it look Christmassy you can add you know a few stragglers if you want to or just leave it as is okay so now we're just going to finish it off with the doorknob here so I'm just going to do an upside down raindrop here with my black outline consistency small area just use my outline we can smooth out pretty simply pretty easily because it's such a small area and then I'm going to go ahead and just add another dot so I can keep my icing kind of in the same spot here make a little bit of a wider dot and just smooth out whatever I need with my scrub and there we have our door cookie okay now on to our snowflake cookie so this cookie has a lot of sharp edges and curves and I really like the shape so I want to make sure that I have nice crisp lines so that the shape stays as much as possible so every time that there is a sharp point or turn like a you know a sharp turn sharp point I want to touch my bag down every time there is a small curve I try to make that whole curve without touching the bag down to the cookie so here I'm trying to stay as close as I can to the cookie that way I have lots of control over where exactly my piping line is going if I lift my bag too high it's too small of an area and I'm not going to get a nice smooth line and I'm probably going to have way too long of a line so I'm keeping it really close and I make sure to touch down on all those points that way the icing gets stuck on that cookie at those points and makes it nice and sharp if you have to touch down on a curve it's okay you can continue it on but it's always good to try not to that gives you a nice smooth outline and this is why I like to dry my outlines for a couple of minutes before I go and flood especially on you know designs like this where I really really love the shape and I want to keep those nice pointy corners and those curves and if I don't drive my outline I feel like the flood pushes that outline away or you know it sucks it in a bit or it just distorts the outline of the cookie and it doesn't give you that nice clean edge and so after you dry your outline you go in with your flood and these little points at the very tip of the snowflake are small and so you notice that I'm not pushing a lot on my bag I'm not squeezing it very hard and notice there's not a lot of icing coming out when I'm doing my outline I just want to get a little bit of icing going there and get it all to the point so I'm not squishing really hard those points are small if I squish too hard on my bag I'm going to get way too much icing coming out and then as I go towards the middle I can squeeze my bag a little bit harder more icing's coming out and I can go a little bit quicker but it's all about controlling the icing because you want to make sure that you don't flood over the side of the edge or you know over your outline to keep that nice shape and then I go in with my scribe and sometimes I'll pull the icing all the way to the edges to cover my outline little corners like this are really hard to get your icing right over your outline sometimes so that's where the scribe is good to come in and just pull that icing to cover it and it's not necessary to do this step but as you get on in your cooking decorating and you want to take your cookies up to the next level these are those fine little details that you know you will probably only notice maybe not everybody else that eats your cookies well but it really just cleans them up that much nicer and so now I'm going to do the details of the snowflake so my icing is crusted over and I'm just going to draw lines across the snowflake so I've got my first line here and always focus from point a to point b so I touch down I lift it up and I'm focusing a little ahead of my line and where I want to touch down and end my line and now the tricky part the third line here I'm going to try to cross over exactly where the other two cross in the middle so I focus on that middle point at first and then at the end just to make sure I got nice clean lines and here we're using the same technique as we did with the leaves so I'm putting a little bit of pressure in the same spot and then dragging my piping bag down and again putting pressure down and then dragging my piping down as I let go of the pressure so that gives me a kind of leafy look or you know a little design detail that it's a little bit thicker on the edge and then as I pull the icing down and let go of the pressure it gives me a thinner line and it's a great technique to know because you know you do details like this on a snowflake or you do a little bit of leaves or greenery or any kind of design it's very versatile you can pipe the edge of a cookie like this around and make like a beaded edge so it's a really really good technique to practice you can always do it a few times on the paper towel if you squeeze your bag and as you kind of let go drag your bag down and then you get the feel for it and how much pressure you need to put how much pressure you need to let go and that way once you get to your cookie you feel like you have a handle on the bag and here I'm going to add a few lines in the middle and you know you try your best um I'm not always the best at free handing my designs sometimes they go a little bit better than other times sometimes they're not perfect you can see this one's a little bit off but once the whole cookie is done nobody's going to sit there and we're just like oh that line's a little bit shorter or taller than the other ones so you keep adding details don't fret over the small things and you can do whatever design you want I'm just kind of going with it and doing a little design here and then adding where I think maybe we need a little bit more detail so here I'm just going to add a few v's on the lines I think I feel like it's a little bare so it needs a little extra detail there and I love this cookie cutter it's so it's so um try that again and I love this cookie cutter it's such a nice shape and you really don't have to do anything too crazy and you just do a few lines and a few details and you can do a whole set of different types of snowflakes and using different you know piping techniques or different lines dots whatever it may be and they come out so beautiful and I'm going to finish it off with a few dots around just to add a few more details here and just like that you have a beautiful snowflake cookie okay so for our next wreath cookie I have this shape here again this is a plaque that I guess uh just a general shape that I'd like to use it's interesting a little bit more interesting than just a normal circle and I use it in so many sets and you can put anything on it really but I feel it works great for this so here I'm using my outline consistency and again do what feels comfortable sometimes you know going left to right is easier for me so you'll see when I get to the bottom of the cookie that I'm going you know I skip a few bumps and I go left to right sometimes I go right to left just to see depends you know where I'm looking at the cookie where it is for me sometimes when I'm filming it's a little bit harder because I don't have it exactly where I want it to and I stay close to the cookie when I'm outlining my cookie the curves are so small that I just stay really close to my cookie and even if I'm almost dragging my icing which you really never do with royal icing that's totally okay because I try to cover it a little bit with my flood as you'll see I kind of get right in there and then you know I'll take my scribe maybe later and just pull it over the edge of the icing but with this cookie I tend to not lift my bag up too much because those curves are really small and once you've flooded your cookie you want to set it aside let it dry all right now we're going to do the base of our wreath so I have my brown outline consistency here and I'm just going to make a circle and so I touch down and I'm just lifting my bag up and just holding it in the air and I'm just going along sometimes you have to guide your outline so if you're icing if you're pulling your icing string really tight you have to you know go a little bit outside or further than your circle to get it to land where you want it to land if you're pushing a little bit more pressure so your string is kind of going straight almost straight down to the cookie then you can sort of guide it a little better so it depends like how much pressure and how tight you're holding that string of icing sometimes you have to go way past where you actually want the icing to land so just get a feel for it you can do this like practice a few times on a paper towel and then you can go ahead and do it on your cookie I'm just going to keep layering until I have a nice thick branchy looking circle here and when you're done you can touch down if you want to add more you can go ahead and and you know give a few more branches there and again I'm going to go in for my green icing my light green icing this is my outline consistency and I'm doing the the you know pressure and pull kind of motion again so I keep my bag in one spot squeeze the bag get those little bottle of icing out and then I drag the bag down and that'll give me a little tip you want before you start this um this section you want to make sure that your brown icing has dried a little bit it's very thick icing so it doesn't take too long to dry enough so that when you're piping this green stuff you won't be able to move the brown icing it'll stay in its place and it's hard to pipe on top of that brown icing because you're going from a flat surface to a kind of bumpy raised surface and even for me I just kind of go with it I just try to pipe and just keep going on top it doesn't always look the best but then you can add those little details at the end or add a few extra leaves here and there and it just comes together so here I'm just adding some lines in the inside of the wreath and I'm just going to alternate and do you know a few leaves here and then a few of these sort of branches here and you can see I'm piping on the cookie and then on the branch so it's not the smoothest you know perfect looking lines but I'm just getting my base to see where I'm going to go with this and then I'll come back after and then pipe on top just to give it more depth and coverage and sometimes your thick icing doesn't stick well to the cookie and that's okay you can just wipe off your tip if it is stuck to your tip just give it a little swipe get rid of that icing and start fresh a lot of times with thick icing it doesn't stick well because it's kind of dry really if you think about it there's less water in it so it's kind of dry and it doesn't stick well to dry icing or you know if your flood has dried already or you're piping on top of sometimes you got to really push out that icing and and touch it down well to something like the other icing so that it sticks to the cookie if your icing is not sticking at all if you're having a lot of trouble with um these lines and not sticking well then it usually means that it's just a little bit too dry so if you are having a really hard time outlining I actually had this with some of my Christmas cookies I was working on I made my outline a little bit too thick and I kept it just kept breaking on me it wouldn't stick to the cookie it stuck for the first few seconds and as I continue pumping my line I would I was just ending up pulling my whole piping line you know to another it would just come off and so I actually had to add a few drops of water to it remix it together just with a spoon stirred it in and it makes such a difference you know when it when icing is giving you trouble and it's not giving you the result it's usually the consistency you know if your flood is just way too loose and you're in your flooding areas that are smaller and you can't control it because it's just just coming out so fast usually it's too thin so add a little powder sugar for these details too if they're not coming out sharp enough if sometimes your stiff icing isn't stiff enough your outline is not thick enough then that's when you want to add a little powdered sugar to it give it a stir see if it's looks a bit thicker if not you might have to add a little bit more sometimes it looks really thick when you add powdered sugar right away you start stirring in you're like oh my gosh I added too much powdered sugar and then as you stir and stir and stir you see that it's actually absorbed at all and it's not quite as thick as you thought it would be so sometimes I usually add some powdered sugar stir it up see how it is I might add a little bit more after and again you want to make it stiff but not too stiff where it's dry and it's not sticking to your cookie for the ones that you're pressure piping if you make those too stiff too then it's really hard to get a nice smooth kind of leaf out of it and so once I've done I'm just going to do this one side here and so I've built up my leaves I like them now and I'm going to add the last little detail so this is my outline red and again in groups of three here I'm going to add the holly and then a couple one-offs just to just to give it a little more detail sometimes it's too much if you have groups of three everywhere so I like to add a little dot here and there okay on to our last cookie so this here is going to be our holly cookie and I'm going to outline so every time I am oh you can see my icing broke there so again I just wipe the tip off and I'm going to go so I'm focusing from one corner to the other so I'm touching down securing my icing lifting up my bag and slowly as I get to that next corner I lower my piping bag to that corner so I can touch down so I'm focusing from point a to point b where I'm going to get and in between will fix itself because I'm pulling the icing to make it nice and straight once my outline has dried I can go in and flood notice my left finger against my piping bag there I kind of pipe two-handed even when I'm flooding especially around these edges because I want my hand nice and steady and that finger really helps me keep a steady bag so my right hand is doing all the pressure squeezing the bag and that left finger is sort of guiding my hand to make it nice and steady especially when you're putting pressure on the bag it's really hard to keep a steady hand so this really really helps and if my flood is really loose see there's a few gaps there I do that on purpose sometimes just because if I have a really loose flood it ends up being too much on my cookie and it flows a little bit too much over the edge so I usually leave a few gaps and then just fill it in with my scribe and here we're going to do the same technique as the stocking so I've got my icing nice and dry and then I'm going to put some flood icing and use the paintbrush and I'm just dabbing straight down and again if your flood is really loose and as you're dabbing or you put too much flood let's say and it you know you're dabbing but it kind of melts down and it's not keeping that that texture then you know keep going at it because the more you work it the more it'll sort of dry out and if it's still really wet and it's not keeping it you can put it aside for you know or just stop for like 30 seconds 20 seconds depending how wet it is and then come back with the brush just as it's starting to dry and that'll give you more texture it's hard to see the detail in the video but it looks amazing to me it just gives it a little bit of detail gives it like snowy look that wintry look that we're going for so here you can scrape in to the cookie a rough outline if you want or you can freehand I've practiced a few times on paper towel but I'm just kind of going rough edge of the holly here and one of the leaves is going off the side which is fine I like kind of mixing it up sometimes that it's not all centered and after I outline it I'm going to go in and flood I like to let my outlines dry I feel like it holds the flood in it holds the shape much better sometimes when I tend to flood right after I outline my flood pushes the outline into like outward and so it doesn't look as good as sharp and clean when the outline is dry it stays in its place much better and it doesn't get pushed around by the flood and then once that's done we're gonna grab our red outline consistency and I'm going to make the three holly dots and I have a little peak because it is thicker icing and so I go in with my scribe and I just wiggle and I'm just trying to get rid of that little peak but this is a nice puffy icing because it's my outline icing and that's our last cookie the holly cookie well I hope you enjoyed the winter wonderland Christmas tutorial thank you so much for watching as always and thank you so much for supporting my channel stay tuned for more Christmas tutorials happy baking and decorating