
And we’re back with another installment of the Nightmare Before Christmas Tea Party series! This week we’re featuring a sugar cookie recipe with charmingly ornate royal icing Zero and nightscape designs. If these cookies make you half as happy as they make me, I’ve done my job. But why another Friday update? Allow me to answer you in verse:
What’s this? What’s this?
There’s flour everywhere
What’s this?
Baking smells in the air
What’s this?
A table laid with cookies
There’s so much icing
Get this black goop out of my hair!
What’s this?
Yes, I managed to get icing in my damn hair.
But seriously, these are quite possibly the best homemade sugar cookies you’ll ever make in the history of ever. Your little ones will love you, your demented teenager will come out of their room for five minutes, your Nightmare Before Christmas-loving significant other will make shrill happy sounds before tackling you, your coworkers will hail you as the food-bringing office hero.. it’s a win:win:win:win situation.
Ready? Let’s go.
Gamers, grab your mats:
COOKIES:
- 2 1/2 cups flour
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 2 sticks butter, unsalted
- 3/4 cup sugar
Adapted from Food Network.
ICING:
- 2 egg whites, beaten
- 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- black gel or concentrated food coloring (not liquid)
- red gel or concentrated food coloring (not liquid)
- dash water
Recipe sort of adapted from Allrecipes.

Sift together flour, salt, and baking powder in a medium bowl. Set aside.

Dump room temperature butter and sugar into a large bowl and beat on medium-high for about 5 minutes. Kind of looks like really good whipped mashed potatoes. Aaaaaaand now I want mashed potatoes.

Add vanilla and egg and beat until fully combined.

Reduce hand mixer to low and add in your flour mixture, one-half at a time until just combined. This feels like a strange process without a stand mixer. That I need. Ahem. Once that’s done, set out two pieces of plastic wrap and divide dough evenly between wrap. +5 difficulty points for having to use plastic wrap. I hate plastic wrap; it’s a pain in the ass.

Shape dough into disks and wrap tightly. Refrigerate for at least an hour, but let’s be honest… if you get caught up playing Skyrim it’ll be lucky to make it past that stage before bedtime.

Dust your work surface, rolling pin, dough, and armpits with flour. Why armpits? It’ll make its way up there eventually. Might as well just get that bit out of the way now. Working with one portion of dough at a time, roll out with dusted rolling pin (I was serious about that part) until dough is about 1/8″ thick.

Cut first portion of dough into circles. Because I somehow don’t have round or square cookie cutters, I used a cup.

Place cookies onto parchment paper lined baking trays and refrigerate for 30 minutes. You can re-roll your scraps to make more cookies, but pop it back in the fridge for 30 minutes if the dough gets too loose. For the square cookies I used the same round cup, then trimmed the edges with a sharp knife.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and arrange racks on the top and bottom third sections of the oven. Bake cookies for 13-15 minutes, or until lightly puffed and just turning golden, switching racks halfway through. Remove from oven and allow to cool on pans for five minutes before transferring to a cooling rack.
While those are cooling, prep your royal icing:

Beat two egg whites in a large bowl until frothy. Do not shoot yourself in the foot by using literally the biggest bowl in the house because you can’t adult hard enough to wash dishes. Applaud yourself for catching egg yolks before they hit the floor because they slipped out of the shells.

Add powdered sugar and cream of tartar and beat until glossy and icing holds its shape. Despite measuring everything correctly, I ended up with this:

Icing should be thick, but not unworkable. Use a few drops of water as needed if you encounter this issue. I think I used about a tablespoon to make it work.
Divide icing into four bowls: 1/3 into one bowl, 1/3 into another, 1/6 into another, and 1/6 into the last. In order, this will be your border icing, flooding icing, black border icing, and black flooding icing. Mix black icing into latter two bowls. Thin both flooding icing bowls to about a syrup consistency.
Remove a small spoonful of white flooding icing into a shot glass, mix with red coloring for Zero’s nose and collar.
IMPORTANT: Cover any unused icing with a damp cloth to avoid having it dry out.
Transfer icing into piping bags. Sandwich baggies could be used, but piping bags are highly preferred for this for sturdiness and control. If you have them, fit with coupler and #3 metal tip. If not, cut a bit off from the tip and improvise. Apparently my #3 tip has gone AWOL so I used a #5 for the white border icing. Should have just snipped the tip of the bag. Oh well.

Pipe a white border on the round cookies:

Flood the center with white flooding icing:

Evenly distribute the icing with a toothpick or skewer. Don’t smear or spread; a gentle circular scribbling motion will do.

For the detail work you can either wait an hour for the icing to dry or do this immediately. I opted to get it all done in one go. This is about the time when pictures work best:

Using flooding icing is easiest for this bit to allow room for error.

Add toothpick detail for the finer bits:

Using black border icing, make a dot border around the entire cookie:

I preferred the look of a connected border, so I lightly dragged my toothpick through the dots for this final look:

For the square cookies, draw Zero with black flooding icing in the wet flooding icing. It won’t look quite right otherwise. Add a dot of red for the nose and a line for the collar.


You’re done! Personally, I think sugar cookies are one of the most perfect ‘tea party’ foods, but these are almost too pretty to eat! Decisions, decisions… Don’t forget- voting is still open for November’s Featured recipe! Get your clicker finger ready and vote!
Coming Up Next: Jack Skellington Whoopie Pies
Cheers,
Leisel
Remember, cooking IRL doesn’t have to be a Feat of Strength!
These cookies look super cool! Great job! 🙂
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Thanks! This was another one of those tedious-nut-fun ones. >_>
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How adorable are these? I love your icing skills and the black and white is always classy!
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Thank you! It can be challenging work but worth it.
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Awesome! You made the decorating look easy.
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Yes! SUCCESS!
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Reblogged this on Dream Big, Dream Often and commented:
Another great treat from Skill Up Skillet!
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These are so very pretty,I would not mind a box of these any day.
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I’m obsessed with these!!
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I’d hate to tell you that our coworkers and family ate them all in less than a day!
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I love these cookies! They’re too perfect to eat, though
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Uh. Well… Whoops?
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I just can’t get over the icing art. I mean, it’s soooo amazing! But sure, I would eat them in the end ! lol
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Sometimes, that’s just what you have to do. Though I have a couple of coworkers who took home the candy pinatas to display, not eat.
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I don’t blame them! Those were picture perfect too
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I am beyond impressed. These are gorgeous!! 🙂
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These look great; I see the cookies making an appearing in my kitchen in the next few weeks.
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<333
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I love the film and the cookies look fantastic! :). Can’t wait to have a go!
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These look to die for, thanks for sharing!
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You’re welcome; glad you enjoyed the post!
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I want to try this for my Christmas party! My friends will be so impressed!
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Don’t worry, they don’t have to know how easy it gets after the first few cookies. Bathe in the compliments!
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Wow! Leisel they are amazing! Edible art is the best art 😉
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YES! All day, every day.
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My two loves! Cookies and Jack Skellington lmao. I really want to try these!! Thanks for sharing!
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Those are amazing!! My husband loves that movie so he would get a kick out of these cookies 🙂
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Love the cookies you really have the art for it 🙂
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Thanks! I love making art; I hadn’t had the opportunity to create for so long.
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These are so fantastic! I’m an artist for a living and I still don’t think I could do as great a job with the decorating as you’ve done. Rock on!
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\m/ (>.<) \m/
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Wow! You did an amazing job on these!
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Reblogged this on Jennifer Dawn and commented:
OMG!! I love Nerdy Nummies and came across these! I am subscribing RIGHT NOW!
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Where is the OMG! I LOVE IT! button? These would definitely cheer me up..just need to make them gluten free!
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I’m really bad about that sort of thing. The meringue cookies in the last post were at least diabetic friendly, and that’s a first.
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These are darling LOVE these!!! Thanks for linking up at Learning from Each Other!
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Co cute! I love how you started the post too! I like the Nightmare Before Christmas!
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These are amazing!
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Lovely…my mouth is watering lookibg at ur cookies…superb….Dear Liesel..needed a help from you.Where can I learn more on adding widgets and putting themes to my site.please guide me..Thanks
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Such a skillful decorator! I’m loving these designs, especially Zero. 🙂 Thanks for stopping by and sharing this recipe on Five Friday Finds! I’m looking forward checking out your recipe this week. 🙂
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Thank you so much! I’m surprised Zero went over so well; I feel a little bad I wasn’t able to show off the step-by-step decor on him. Bloody wet royal icing.
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Well they look great despite the icing sugar in your hair! I can identify with you. At the moment I’m icing a minion birthday cake for our grandson. I have yellow and blue icing everywhere! Thanks for sharing with us at #anythinggoes.
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Thanks again for linking up this week with #AnythingGoes. Not long until these cookies will be all gobbled up!
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I agree, sugar cookies are so great with tea and coffee. These are so adorable, thanks for sharing! #BlogBoosterParty
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Thank you! I’ll be excited to make these again for that very reason.
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#AnythingGoes is great because of you! Thank you for continuing to support this Link Party with your talent and creativity.
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I’m a baker too and I’m planning on making geeky baked goods as well! These are absolutely beautiful! Love your blog!!
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Thank you so much! I can’t wait to see what kind of goodies you come up with. ❤
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I usually do fondant cakes which are mostly for aesthetics, but my true love (more like soul mate) are cookies. Not everything I was planning was geeky, but your page is giving me inspiration!
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Fondant is Satan. I spent 15 hours on my TNT cake. Right now I want as little to do with fondant as humanly possible.
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Hahaha! We’ve all had those days! I’m sorry, I’ve cursed fondant out many times. We have a love/hate relationship.
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Who’s sorry? I’m not afraid to throw an F-bomb or 5,000 at fondant. (That cake was so freaking good though.)
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LOL! My sentiments exactly!! Isn’t that what they call, “made with love”?
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