Icing Glaze for Cookies

I love to bake rolled cookies. I love decorating them, too.


But I don't really enjoy making royal icing. It's a high maintenance ordeal: one batch to outline and do detail work, another batch to fill the cookies. It seems like a fair amount of trouble.

Plus royal icing doesn't taste good. It doesn't taste bad, exactly, but it's not good, either. It's kind of like fondant in that way: pretty to look at, not so much to eat.

This icing recipe is it. Easy, I mean, super easy. The icing dries hard enough so that cookies can be packaged in cellophane bags or stacked. The color stays true after the cookies dry, too.

1 cup confectioners' sugar
2 teaspoons milk or water (I used water. I'm always leering of leaving anything that has dairy product out at room temperature for any amount of time.)
2 teaspoons light corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
assorted food coloring

Put the water or milk in a small bowl and gradually add the confectioners' sugar. Stir until smooth. (I had to add another teaspoon or two of water.) Beat in the corn syrup and vanilla until icing is smooth and glossy. If icing is too thick, add more corn syrup.

Divide the icing into separate bowls, and add food colorings to each to desired intensity.

Place wire cooking racks over paper towels. Dip cookies into the icing and place the cookies on the wire racks. Any excess icing will drip onto the paper towel.

While the icing is still wet, you can embellish them with sanding sugars and sprinkles. You can spoon a bit of other colors onto the cookie and use a toothpick to swirl the colors around. It makes a marbelized-tie-dyed effect.

The cookies need to dry several hours before they will be hard enough to package or stack.

But you can eat them right away.