10 Unique Cookie Decorating Ideas For The Holiday Season

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The most wonderful time of the year is upon us — for sweets lovers, that is. We have transitioned past the pie-baking extravaganza of Thanksgiving straight into the land of peppermint bark, candy canes, Yule logs, and our personal favorite: holiday cookies. The stand mixer has assumed its rightful place on the countertop, you've done your seasonal Costco run and stocked the pantry with all the vanilla extract, flour, and sugar you need, and all that's left is to decide which cookie recipes you're going to make. While you might have the recipes and the techniques down, you may be scratching your head about how to decorate them.

Sure, there is no shortage of cookie decorating kits out there, but if you want to win the admiration of your family and friends, and the folks at your annual holiday cookie swap, you're going to have to take your decorations to the next level. Pulling out all the festive stops doesn't have to be a lot of work though, and there are tons of simple tricks you can try to give your cookies an innovative yet unfussy seasonal edge. Gone are the days of flooding royal icing on basic sugar cookies and rifling through your candy drawer to find something to stick on your gingerbread house; these unique tips will give you the creative inspo you need to make this year's Christmas cookies the best ever.

The key to making cookies that stand out at your family's or workplace's annual cookie swap is to utilize color and texture. Stained glass cookies offer both. These cookies, as their name suggests, typically have a sugar cookie outline with a vivid, glass-like center. One of the preferred methods is to use isomalt — a sugar substitute that needs to be melted in a pan before it can be poured into the baked cookie cutouts. This ingredient can be difficult to work with, especially if you are a candy-making novice, but luckily there is a more readily available and easy-to-use alternative at your disposal: hard candies.

You'll want to add the crushed candies — which can include anything from Jolly Ranchers to Lifesavers — to the center of the cookie cutouts before they go in the oven. As the cookies bake, the sugar will melt and fill in the center of the cookies. It's important to note that when the sugar starts to melt it will expand and flow, meaning you'll want to avoid filling the centers so much that they crest the center of the cookie. Melted sugar is also very hot and very sticky, meaning this may not be a cookie to make with kids. The candy center will need to have set before these cookies can be transferred from the lined baking sheet to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Try swapping out the standard sugar cookie for gingerbread, and once the cookies are cool, feel free to decorate them. For a fun twist, punch a tiny hole in the top before baking and loop a Red Vine through after they've cooled to make it look like an ornament.

One essential baking item to stock up on for the holiday season is food coloring. It's used in a whole bunch of holiday bakes and frostings, including dyeing Rice Krispies Treats green or adding some edible decor to your Yule log. However, the secret to making colored frosting cookies that stand out is to use this baking staple in a totally different way. Instead of stirring the dye into the frosting, try making a marbled, ombre design for your ornament- or snowflaked-shaped.

Gel food coloring is the best option for this hack, as it doesn't disperse as well into the frosting as water-based coloring drops or powders. You'll also want to dilute that gel food coloring with vodka to enhance the color and alter the moisture content. Once your cookies have been baked, cooled, flooded with royal icing, and left to dry, you can apply the vodka onto the surface of the icing with a paintbrush, then dab and swirl your gel food coloring on the frosting using a separate brush. Layer the shades, and go back with more vodka or extra plain white frosting for contrasting highlights. Since they're snowflakes, they don't need to look alike, so get creative with the colors and patterns on each one to make them look unique.

The majority of Christmas cookies lack dimension — literally. Adding a thick royal icing, perched on the top of the cookie rather than flattening down, can be a fun, but if you want to have cookies that literally stand tall above the competition, you're going to have to practice your construction skills. Rest assured, it's not as difficult as assembling a gingerbread house, and you get to double up on all that cookie flavor in doing so.

The trick is simple: Stack your cookies one on top of the other to create a 3-D effect. And we're not just talking about Linzer cookies, which are already stacked anyway. You can stack your cutout cookies — regardless of whether they're the same shape or different ones — to add height to your treat.

One excellent place to start is with round cutouts to create stacked snowmen cookies using small, medium, and large circle cutouts (biscuit cutters or shot glasses could also work). Once your cookies have been baked, cooled, and frosted (you'll want to use a basic white buttercream), carefully stack one on top of the other — slightly off-center — and use a small dab of icing to secure them before piping on your buttons, carrot nose, and scarf. You can also use star-shaped cutouts for a tall Christmas tree. Secure a mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cup to the bottom to mimic the base of the tree, and add a yellow candy on top for the star.

When most people think of "cookie decorating," their minds immediately go straight to the frosting and the icing. But, if you want to add a simple — and less sweet — decoration to your holiday cookies, reach for decorative sugars instead. There are many different-sized sugars available, and they all are fit for certain uses. Simulate freshly fallen snow with sifted powdered sugar; you can use a sheet of paper or a cutout to create an artful dusting that's heavier in some places than others.

You can also use coarser sugars as accents on your cookies. If you're making cutout snowflakes, for example, get yourself some pearl sugar — a very coarse sugar often used for waffles and garnishing cardamom buns. Before the frosting has set, artfully add a sprinkle of pearl sugar for a shimmery effect. You can also use this sugar to accessorize the sides of your gingerbread house or add texture to your piped ugly sweater cookies.

There's also colored sugar, which you can dip your cookies into before baking, that will offer not only a crunchy texture but also color and shine. We love using colored sugar as a less-sweet alternative to frosting. Simply brush on a coating of heavy cream or half-and-half with a pastry brush, then sprinkle on the sugar with your fingers. It's an easy, kid-friendly, and festive way to elevate your cutout cookies.

Why not give your office Christmas party a bit more of an interactive feel? Instead of just wearing holiday sweaters to the event, challenge your participants to decorate ugly sweater cookies with cutout cookies (you just need this ugly sweater cutter). The best part is that no one will know if you were supposed to mess up your cookies.

While this activity is all in good fun, fellow overachievers will be happy to know that there is a surefire way to win this contest, even if you have little artistic ability. Use a narrow, plain piping tip and straight edge, set on a diagonal, to create a striking plaid pattern with multiple icing colors. Once you finish the diagonal one way, swap to the other to create a visually striking crosshatch pattern. Pamela from HR will have no clue what hit her.

If the thought of piping gives you nightmares (understandably so), you may want to turn to an airbrush and stencil to create this pattern on your batch of homemade cookies. You can repurpose this tool during other times of the year as well; summery gingham cookies, perfect for a picnic, can be made easily with this versatile decorating tool.

Candy melts are far from the most flavorful cookie decoration out there — but in this case, it's a good thing. These wafers, sold by brands like Wilton, come in an array of colors and are designed to be melted. While chocolate certainly has its place on Christmas cookies — seeing as it adds both color and flavor — candy melts are an excellent alternative when you want a more pastel color and don't want to alter the flavor of your cookies too much.

One of our favorite simple ways to decorate Christmas cookies is to dip them in a bowl of molten candy melts, then add a flavorful sprinkle on top. If you want to give your cookies an artful touch, only dip half of them into the candy melts before transferring them to a lined baking sheet, adding your garnish, and letting the melts set. Colored sugars, festive nonpareils, and even sizable hard sprinkles are kid-friendly and seasonal, though you could also make use of more adult selections, like crushed candy canes, freeze-dried fruit (use raspberries or strawberries for a bright pop of festive red), crushed peppermint meringues, and the like. You can also dip the entire cookie in the candy melts; just be sure to have a fork handy so that you can fish it out when it's time to garnish.

Everyone needs a cookie at their cookie swap that makes everyone say, "Oh now how cute is that!" These melted snowmen cookies fit the bill and are guaranteed to be the talk of your holiday party. You can use whatever cookies you'd like, be it sugar cookies, gingersnaps, or chocolate chip. Add a haphazard coating of white royal icing to the surface; you can also push it off the edges to really sell the whole "melting" idea. Then it's time for your marshmallows. While you could just plunk them on the tops of your cookies, the better way to simulate the "melting" effect is to place them, one at a time, on a greased microwave-safe plate. Nuke them until they start to expand, then immediately transfer them to the still-wet icing. Once the cookies have all been assembled, you can add your finishing touches with decorating gel.

The only con of these cookies is that two-day-old marshmallows that have been nuked and exposed to air don't taste very good. As such, these are cookies that you'll want to eat the same day you decorate them. However, the good news is that they're so cute that it will be hard not to eat them.

Gingerbread house season brings out the architect (and decorator) in all of us. Not only do you have to engineer a stable house out of entirely edible materials, but you also have to take it to the next level by decorating it to the nines. Creating a gingerbread home — not just a house — calls for pulling out all the stops: candy, icing, slivered almonds, and a surprising ingredient — cereal.

Cereal usually isn't in folks' decorating arsenal, but it should be. Day-old, stale cereals on Christmas cookies may not be practical, but on a gingerbread house that you don't plan on eating, they can really work. Most breakfast cereals are structurally secure, don't break easily when handled, and can give your house fun textures that you wouldn't be able to get from gumdrops and meringues alone.

There are many different options for what you can use depending on the texture you're looking for. Give your house a snow-kissed thatched roof with Frosted Mini-Wheats, or add some rustic charm by carefully layering Cinnamon Toast Crunch squares on the shingled roof. Roofing isn't the only place where cereal can come in handy, either. You can create meandering paths with a handful of Cheerios, Froot Loops, or Cocoa Pebbles. Bran sticks can be used to create festive wood piles, and Kix or similar colored ball-shaped cereals can be used to simulate ornaments. Regardless of the type of cereal you use, be sure to secure it with a fair amount of royal icing.

There are some Christmas cookies that can benefit from texture, but not necessarily from a dollop of sugary icing. If you want to add a decorative flair to your butter cookies, Linzer cookies, or shortbread, consider reaching for your set of stamps instead of a piping bag. Right before you put your dough into the oven, grab your food-safe stamp of choice, dust it in a coating of flour, and gently press it into the raw dough to add your pattern. You can use a gentle rocking motion to release the dough from the stamp, though you don't want to rock so much that you disturb the design. You can also use this technique to create round stamped cookies; just press the balls with the stamp to flatten them. For best results, try this technique on an uncoated cookie sheet so that the dough will more easily release from the stamp, and always use dough that's been adequately chilled (and in some cases, you may want to chill it again before baking to encourage the design to stick).

Don't have any cookie stamps? Another way to break up the visual monotony of your cookies without pressing a design into them is to use doilies. Yes, those decorative sheets of paper that everyone seems to have forgotten about? You can lay them over some (or all) of your cookies before rolling them out with a pin.

Cereal isn't the only unconventional building material worth experimenting with on your gingerbread house and beyond. We often think of Christmas cookies as having only sweet decorations, but why not turn to savory ones as well? Pretzels, for example, have an excellent unconventional shape, making them ideal for decorative windows on gingerbread houses and antlers for reindeer cookies. Dip round pretzels into green candy melts and stick them on your gingerbread house as an edible mini wreath. You can also crumble up potato chips to dip your chocolate-coated Christmas cookies in, or use them as bark on a tree inside of your gingerbread house village. Nuts, like pistachios, can add 3-D texture to your wreath cookies, while slivered almonds make for excellent roof shingles.

You can even turn savory snacks into their own non-cookie treats. Grab a handful of pretzel sticks, lay them on top of each other at different angles, and fuse them together with royal icing to create 3-D snowflakes; you could even stick them on a snowflake-shaped cutout cookie for added stability. Cornflake or popcorn wreath cookies are another option; these fan-favorite takes on a Rice Krispies treat use cornflakes or freshly popped kernels instead of rice cereal. While they're aren't technically cookies, they are still just as festive and delicious.