Best Tips for making Christmas Cookies

The best Holiday Baking Tips for making the perfect cookies. Things to help you plan your holiday baking day and make it more fun and more creaative. 

Be sure while visiting The Harvest Moon B&B to check out all that Lancaster has to offer including our Restaurant Guide. Here you can find all types of restaurants throughout the county that will for sure please the "Foodie" in all of us. We also have your "Pocket Concierge";  our own app that you can down load onto your phone. Here you can discover the many different ways you can embellish your Lancaster County Experience. 

Best Tips for making Perfect Christmas Cookies

1.  Tools of the Trade –

Tools are important; always have an ample and readily available supply of cutting implements, cookie cutters, and rollers, stamps, piping bags, paint brushes and molds. They will prove useful as get more involved. 

2. Garnishing –

Garnishes are equally as important; several gourmet shops, baking shops and your local grocer have compiled varied supplies of sprinkles, pastes and sugars to use while decorating

3. Don't be afraid of Chocolate –

Chocolate; not as hard as it seems, heat slowly over a double boiler, don’t get water in it. This is a sure fire way of getting it to work

4. Sugar Cookies –

Great sugar cookies??!! Work with just half the dough, roll dough on a pastry cloth, dip the cutter in flour, make cutouts close together, chill scraps before re-rolling, use a wide metal spatula to transfer cutouts, bake similar size cookies together, place cutouts 1 inch apart

5. Butter, Butter and more Butter –

Nothing beats the flavor of butter, it has a deep richness and it contributes to the texture and browning of the cookie. All other oils, shortenings and blends do not contribute the same flavor.

 Bonus Tip –

Thick, Thin, and In-Between
You can make frostings and icings in different consistencies depending on how you're going to use them. Make a batch of icing and divide it into bowls, then add liquid a few drops at a time to thin the icing as needed:

Thick icing is best for adding fine details with a piping bag usually after an iced cookie has completely dried to a hard finish.
Thin icing is best for "flooding" a cookie with a smooth layer of color, for dipping cookies, or for drizzling a thin thread of icing over a cookie. You can use a piping bag or squeeze bottle, and a small paintbrush or toothpick to help coax thinned icing into areas if needed.
In-between thick and thin is the medium consistency of icing you'll use to outline areas of the cookie you're going to flood with thin icing. Use a piping bag or squeeze bottle.

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