Sugar Cookies Are 10x More Flavorful When You Use This Simple Royal Icing Tip

Sugar cookies can be a few things. They can be among the easiest cookies to make. They can be as sweet as their name implies. They can be plenty decorative. But that usually concludes their potential. That is totally fine, but there are also ways to make sugar cookies really shine should you want them to. You can make your sugar cookies even tastier when you imbue the otherwise one-note royal icing on top with a little more flavor via a tip of your favorite flavor extracts.

You can make royal icing with powdered sugar and egg whites alone. It will harden as expected, but this most basic composition isn't going to taste like much more than that former ingredient. That's where the vanilla, nut, and botanical extracts that you might already have in the cabinet can come in handy to improve your sugar cookies. You can usually zhuzh them up with what amounts to little more than a few drops of your preferred pick in the mix. You can also mix and match your royal icing extract flavors for some fun cookie combinations, provided you also keep your color balance in mind.

You should only need up to a teaspoon of something like the ubiquitous vanilla extract per pound of powdered sugar to notice a difference. You can scale that accordingly, while also keeping in mind that particularly strong extracts like peppermint might only need a half teaspoon per pound. Consider potential pigmentation if you're trying to keep your royal icing white as well. Even that small splash of pure vanilla extract (not the imitation stuff) has enough of an amber tone to slightly alter an otherwise unadorned royal icing's freshly fallen hue. On the flip side, other pure extracts like almond and peppermint can be completely clear. Keep the extract's natural color in mind, or add it to royal icing that you've already tinted with food coloring to mask it.

The aforementioned vanilla and peppermint are an excellent combination to add to royal icing across a sugar cookie. You could theoretically stir them together in a single royal icing blend, but they'll pop more obviously when brushed on side by side in stripes or in some other design that won't risk muddling their individual notes. Their respective warm, cool qualities go great together in plenty of other applications, and the mint can even smoothen a sugar cookie's more cloying quality. Almond extract is also lovely on its own or when paired with something like coffee extract to amplify the latter's own fragrant nuttiness. And citrus classics like orange and lemon are similarly great alone or joined in botanical harmony with extracts like lavender and rosemary. Whichever you pick, extracts will make sure your royal icing adds more to the sugar cookie than just sweetness.