Adding Sanding Sugar to Cookies

A new year puts me in the mood for cleaning and organizing.  I’ve just about finished the house, so now it’s on to the computer.  I’ve had this post saved for MONTHS but just never published it.  Why?  Because the pictures suck.  Not one of my brightest ideas to use clear sugar to demonstrate adding sanding sugar to a cookie but I have those moments sometimes.  I blame the kids.

Anyway, I guess I have a thing for sanding sugar.  It’s an easy way to make plain cookie look really special.  I have it in about every single color imaginable.

Sanding sugar should not be mistaken with course sugar.  It’s a totally different thing which I’ll explain in detail next week.  In the meantime, I’ll show you how I add it to the outside of my cookies.  It’s easier to do than you might think.

Get REALLY close to the screen and you might be able to see the clear sugar around my daisies!

Did I mention I resolved not to take any bad photos in 2012?

Start with a cookie that has been decorated and is completely dry.  I always work on a sheet of waxed paper so I save the excess sugar to use again.

Use piping icing to outline the area that you want sugared.  You can use a matching color or a different one entirely if you want to change things up.  Just make sure the icing is the consistency of toothpaste.

After outlining pour sugar directly onto the wet border.  Don’t do too many at once, because if you do the icing will dry  and the sugar won’t stick.

Give the border dry {maybe an hour or two} then dump off the excess sugar.  After about 3 hours use a clean dry paintbrush to move any sugar that might have been left behind.

Fold the waxed paper in half and put it back into the jar.  You can see a visual example HERE.  For a picture tutorial on how I add sanding sugar to the entire surface of a cookie click HERE.

And for those of you who cannot see a darn thing I did with that clear sugar, here’s a video example.

When you’re finished, you’ll have these…

or these, for those of you without magic invisible sugar sensing eyes.

That’s all it takes!  Easy, right?

Okay, for I know I have been a little boring lately, but I am finally getting back into the swing of things.  My little guy went back to school today, I spend a disgraceful twenty minutes on my clothes rack elliptical machine and promptly decided cookie decorating was way more fun.

What I’m trying to say is that I am finally back on track and seeing as how I will probably be too sore to walk tomorrow, I’ll have even more sitting time in the next few days which I promise will be spent decorating. That and taking non-sucky photos, I hope!

Have a great weekend, everyone!!!