Many are wary of icing to decorate it. Glossy icing for New Year's cookies, despite its rather simple recipe, requires special diligence and high concentration to obtain the perfect consistency. ELLE is about how to make the perfect icing for your New Year's cookies.

It is believed that a properly prepared glaze is not only beautiful, but also healthy, because under it the cookies retain their freshness longer. The main thing is that it has the right consistency - not too thick and not too liquid, but looks like sour cream or honey. Only in this case it will easily be applied to the cookies, quickly set and will not treacherously drip around the edges. However, even if the glaze suddenly turned out to be too liquid, you can add an additional spoonful of powdered sugar to thicken it, and if it is too thick, an additional half spoonful of warm water will do the trick.

What is the icing for your Christmas cookies?

To prepare the frosting, you only need three simple ingredients - egg white, powdered sugar and lemon juice. The basic recipe, for about 1 kilogram of cookies, consists of 1 protein, 150 g of powdered sugar and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice. Pastry experts insist that the whitest glaze is obtained from large white eggs, so it is advisable to give preference to them. It is better to sift the powder before mixing the ingredients.

To create a colored glaze, you need to add food colors to the selected shades.

In addition to the sour cream frosting texture for covering the cookies, there is also a recipe for a thicker frosting (150 g more powdered sugar - you get a peanut butter texture), which can be used to create additional details of the picture, whether it be the nose and eyes of a snowman, toys on a Christmas tree or stars in the sky. ... With such icing, you can draw with dots, lines, create patterns on a stencil, and it is also for them that experienced creators of holiday cookies recommend making the primary contour of the drawing around the perimeter of the future fill. It is believed that the thinner (base) frosting will then be easier to apply to the entire cookie surface.

How to apply the icing for your Christmas cookies?

Pastry bags or syringes are usually used to ensure that the icing is evenly applied to the cookies. At the same time, a separate bag should be allocated for each shade of glaze. If it was not possible to acquire special bags in advance, you can contrive and use for this purpose a transparent plastic bag with a paper cone attached to it.

To draw small details when decorating cookies on the farm, special plastic mini-spatulas and the most ordinary toothpicks are useful - they can easily be used to decorate micro-details.

How to store your Christmas cookie icing?

It does not matter if, with all this preparation of cookies and glaze, there is no time left for the decorating process itself - the finished glaze can be put in a tightly closed container and stored for 3-5 days without loss of quality. It is very important to remember that the glaze hardens quickly when exposed to air, so the most important thing in storing it is not to let it "breathe". This way, the icing can be made straight away into large quantities of cookies for the New Year's party, which can then be baked in two or three passes.

Protein icing for gingerbread and cookies is naturally made in many different ways. The one that I usually use is made from whipped egg white and powdered sugar. How does this option compare to protein free icing or unshipped protein icing? The whipped egg white frosting is the most opaque of them all. What does "covering" mean? This is such a special term that artists use when they want to say that paint is not transparent. Watercolor, for example, is completely non-covering. Oil paints, on the other hand, are very opaque. It's the same with glazes. The least opaque is sugar without protein, it can even be made translucent. Protein glaze is denser in any preparation.

Whipped egg white is easier to dose than non-whipped egg whites if you need a thinner frosting. And it is possible to make the protein icing on the whipped egg whites so dry and dense that it will solidify almost instantly - you will not even have time to finish drawing on the cookies, and some of it will already be hard. Sometimes it is convenient, sometimes not, therefore it is rational to choose different glaze for different products.

My protein icing is the perfect icing for making a gingerbread house. One of the stages of its preparation gives a thick and quickly solidifying glue for gluing the walls and roof of the house, and at another stage it is convenient to draw icicles and volumetric ornaments.

Sift the icing sugar.

We wash and disinfect the cold egg thoroughly, then break the shell so as not to damage the yolk, and separate the yolk from the protein.

In cold fat-free dishes and a cold fat-free whisk, beat the protein with a couple of salt crystals until a stable foam, gradually increasing the speed from low to high.

We take about half of the whipped protein and rub it with a fork to the sifted powder. It is with a fork, not a mixer.

As a result, you should have something like this very thick lump. Maybe you need a little more than half of the protein, maybe, on the contrary, a little less (you can add powdered sugar) - eggs come in different sizes, powdered sugar has different moisture. In any case, if you knead this lump with a fork until it is completely homogeneous, i.e. so that there are no lumps, you will get an incredibly dense and dry putty, such as plasticine. So it is convenient for her to glue the walls of gingerbread houses. It does not flow, grabs quickly and holds well.

And if you add a little more beaten protein (each time a fork, and if you grab an extra one - on the contrary, we introduce powdered sugar) - you get such a thick substance. Its advantages, in comparison with a thinner glaze not on whipped egg white, - from this thick nozzle, you can draw icicles on the edge of the roof (it will stretch, but not drip). And with its help, you can create volumetric ornaments, i.e. lay one layer on top of another. With this consistency, it can withstand three or four layers. This means that with this protein glaze, you can draw an ornament, some parts of which will be much higher than others.

Gel dyes are added to this glaze while it is still thick enough. Gel ones are liquid, if they are introduced into the glaze of optimal consistency, it can then become too liquid. Is it logical? If the consistency remains too thick even after adding them, then add either the remains of the whipped protein or lemon juice drop by drop. And the speed of setting the glaze can be increased by letting it stand for about an hour or two before starting work (naturally, under the film, without contact with air). The aged white glaze of the thickness that you see in the top frame sometimes hardens for me even before I have time to finish painting the cookie.

There are processes in the preparation of each dessert that can be omitted (the delicacy will not suffer much from this), but if you are not too lazy, then eaters will receive not only gastronomic, but also aesthetic pleasure. So, the icing for cookies will give homemade baked goods individuality and unique beauty.

Such glaze is easy to prepare and hardens quickly enough after being applied to cookies, but there is a limitation in color. It can be, like chocolate, dark brown, light brown (from milk chocolate) and white. The color of white chocolate fondant can be changed with fat-soluble food colors, but they are unlikely to be found in the regular kitchen.

So, dark (milk or white) chocolate icing is made from:

• 100 g of chocolate;
• 60 ml of milk;
• 10 g butter;
• 250 g icing sugar.

Step by step cooking:

1. Make a steam bath. Pour milk into a bowl over boiling water and put a piece of butter in it.
2. When the butter has melted, add a finely crushed chocolate bar. After all three ingredients have become a homogeneous liquid mixture, sift through the powder. Mix diligently.

Strawberry recipe

A bright, rich berry fudge for coating gingerbread, donuts, and cookies can be made with fresh or frozen berries. Raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, cherries, cranberries, or, as in this example, strawberries are suitable for preparing the glaze in this way.

For berry glaze based on strawberries, you should take:

• 200 g finely ground powdered sugar;
• 100 g fresh or frozen strawberries;
• 15-30 ml of drinking water.

Sequence of work:

1. Blend the washed and dried berries with a blender into a homogeneous mass, which should then be filtered through a sieve to sift out the seeds and remaining whole berry fibers.
2. Add hot water to the sifted icing sugar and mix. Then pour in small doses and rub the berry base with a spoon. Strawberry puree is needed so that all the powder dissolves, and the fondant becomes shiny and uniform, but at the same time viscous and thickish.
3. You should use the berry glaze right away, because during storage the fermentation process can begin, which is fraught with digestive problems.

How to make vanilla frosting?

Each fondant has its own characteristics. For example, a ginger cookie frosting can be flavor neutral because the aroma and flavor of ginger does not need to be added, and a vanilla aromatic frosting can be prepared for regular sugar cookies.

To make vanilla glaze you need to take:

• 270 g icing sugar;
• 13 ml of milk;
• 5 g butter;
• 3 g table salt;
• 2 g vanillin powder.

Preparation:

1. In the microwave oven, melt a piece of butter together with the milk.
2. Add salt, vanilla and sifted icing sugar to the hot butter-milk mixture. Stir the mixture until smooth and you can start decorating the baked goods.

Cooking with caramel and salt

Delicious homemade sticky caramel can make even ordinary shortbread cookies not only tasty, but also beautiful if you deposit them with a pastry bag. The salt added to the caramel frosting will reduce the sweetness of the fudge and add an extra touch of flavor.

For salted caramel glaze you will need:

• 125 ml of cow's milk cream, 33% fat;
• 30 g butter;
• 165 g granulated sugar;
• 65 ml of purified drinking water;
• 3-5 g of coarse sea salt to taste.

How to make cookie frosting caramel:

1. In a small container, warm it up almost to a boil, but, in no case, do not boil the cream and butter. At the time of adding to the caramel, these products should be as hot as possible.
2. Combine water and sugar in a separate saucepan. First, boil the syrup over low heat until the sugar dissolves, then increase the heat and cook without stirring (you can only tilt it slightly from side to side) until a beautiful caramel color.
3. After reaching the desired shade, pour hot butter and cream into a saucepan, salt and quickly stir the mixture with a whisk until smooth. Return the caramel for a couple of minutes to the fire to boil until the desired thickness.
4. Transfer the caramel to a glass container for later storage. After a few hours of cooling, you can start decorating the cookies.

Colored icing for cookies

A nondescript cookie can be turned into an original greeting card with a slight movement of a confectionery cornet filled with colored glaze. Thus, an uncomplicated confectionery product can become an exclusive gift that will be easy to make even for a schoolchild.

The composition of the colored glaze contains only four ingredients:

• 1 chicken egg white;
• 150-200 g of finely ground powdered sugar;
• 15 ml lemon juice;
• food coloring of the desired color.

The process for making sweet cookie dyes:

1. Pour protein into a clean, fat-free (for example, lemon juice) small bowl. Then sift the icing sugar into it in small portions and rub with a fork (silicone spatula or false). The use of a mixer in this case is unacceptable.
2. When the icing is of the required consistency, add lemon juice to it and divide the total mass into separate portions, each of which is painted in the desired color with food coloring. To make the already colored glaze thicker, you should mix the powder into it, so that the fudge becomes thinner - add a little water.

Food coloring is the easiest way to color cookie frostings. If they are not, then turmeric will help to achieve a bright orange color, green - spinach, red - beets, purple - lavender petals.

How to make from marmalade?

Multi-colored icing with different fruit flavors can be made from ready-made marmalade. From such a multi-colored glaze, it will be possible to create whole stained glass windows on cookies. A monochromatic coating with pieces of undissolved marmalade will also look very nice.

Proportions of ingredients for gummy glaze:

• 200 g marmalade;
• 80 g sugar;
• 50 g butter.

We cook in the following way:

1. Cut the gummies into smaller random pieces. Place the sugar, butter, and chopped marmalade in a small, suitable bowl.
2. Build a steam bath on the stove and place a container with prepared ingredients on it. Warm up everything until the sugar is completely dissolved and a more homogeneous state is achieved (with or without undissolved pieces of marmalade).
3. Remove the glaze from the stove and, after cooling down a little, cover the baked goods with a warm mass.

Simple icing sugar

No matter how many recipes for various confectionery sweets are in the hostess's arsenal, you should know how to make icing for cookies from a minimum set of products that can help out in any unforeseen situation.

Plain icing sugar contains:

• 200 g icing sugar;
• 60 ml of drinking water.

Preparation:

1. Combine the powder with water and heat over low heat until smooth and homogeneous. When warming up the glaze, it is imperative to stir it constantly with a wooden or silicone spatula.
2. Decorate the cookies with hot sugar fondant. This same coating can be used for gingerbread and buns.
3. For a pleasant rum flavor ¾ part of the water can be substituted with rum. This glaze can be eaten by adults and children, since all alcohol will evaporate under the influence of heat.

Any baked goods should be not only tasty and aromatic, but also beautiful - both for aesthetics, and for appetizing, and to attract attention. Especially, in our opinion, this is important in the case of cooking something without filling. And in the matter of decorating and improving the taste, icing for cookies will greatly help. Moreover, it can be very different, and its preparation is not too difficult and does not require much time.

White glaze

Let's start with the simplest, most well-known and popular recipe for cookie icing, which is also widely used to decorate biscuits, muffins and gingerbread. For her, you need to very carefully separate the egg white, bring it to a foam with a mixer and add a little powdered sugar, without stopping to work with a mixer. Usually a glass of powder is taken for one protein, but the amount depends on how thick you need the icing for the cookies. If beautiful drips are required, stop at the introduction of three quarters of a glass; if you need a thick dense foam, then a glass and a half can go away.

Chocolate glaze

The second most popular method for decorating baked goods. And the first is inferior only because it is more difficult to prepare. However, New Year's cookies with icing are most often made from these ingredients. For her, a broken bar of chocolate (preferably bitter - milk will not give the required thickness) is heated in a water bath with a quarter of a kilogram of powder, an incomplete spoonful of butter and a glass of milk. Stir continuously so that the main ingredient melts evenly. The cookies are poured almost immediately so that the icing does not freeze in the saucepan. It is not recommended to melt it a second time.

Honey coating

A very good and quick recipe for a honey-based cookie frosting. For her, a piece of oil of 50 grams is combined with two tablespoons of sugar (but it is better to take powder), the same amount of not too liquid natural honey and three tablespoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice. The saucepan is placed on fire (until smooth). When the cookie frosting cools slightly and becomes viscous, it spreads over the baked goods. You can sprinkle nuts on top - it will turn out even tastier and more elegant.

Gummy glaze

The recipe is not complicated, the result of such decoration is very beautiful, especially if you leave unmelted pieces. The same New Year's cookies with multi-colored marmalade icing are snapped up by children faster than anything else, and such pastries look just great on the Christmas tree. The marmalade is cut into small pieces, folded into a ladle or mug, four tablespoons of sugar, 50 grams of butter and two full tablespoons of sour cream are placed there (all this is grams per 200 marmalade). Stir constantly; after ten minutes, when the mixture begins to thicken, the fire turns off. Cool down a little - you can color the cookies.

Creamy glaze

It turns out to be quite stringy, which is especially welcomed by those who want to use the icing for cookies for drawing. Oil is melted over low heat - four heaped spoons, a glass of sugar is poured into it and everything is boiled for five minutes until the liquid acquires a creamy hue. When the sugar is completely dissolved, the container is removed from the heat, 150 ml of cream is poured in, and the mass is whipped until light fluffiness. The vessel is returned to the fire, its contents are boiled for about ten minutes, then cooled with stirring. At this stage, you can add vanilla. As soon as it gets cold and viscous - start drawing.

Coffee-chocolate-marshmallow glaze

For her, we take a glass of milk, heat it well and shake a teaspoon of good instant coffee. 100 grams of butter is heated in a saucepan, 100 grams of sugar is poured into it and coffee milk is poured. The sugar will dissolve - a marshmallow in chocolate is laid, cut into cubes (three pieces are enough). To make it bloom better, it is pressed against the walls with a spoon. After the marshmallow is completely dissolved, the icing for the cookies is cooked for another quarter of an hour. Apply to baked goods while still warm.

Condensed milk frosting

We can say that it is almost an old way of making icing for cookies - our grandmothers still used it. Again, butter is heated (100 g), six spoons of sugar are poured into it, half a can of condensed milk is laid out. It is better to take boiled condensed milk - its consistency is denser. Plus a glass of clean water is poured and cream is poured - dry, three large spoons. After boiling, the mixture is cooked for another five minutes, only the gas must be screwed on. This cookie frosting is very delicate. If you want a "harsher" option, increase the amount of sugar to nine tablespoons and the boil time to a third of an hour.

Butterscotch icing

Also an old recipe. However, it is interesting to this day, since the icing for candy cookies has a peculiar coffee color and comes out very viscous, but does not freeze as quickly as chocolate. Preparing is elementary: a quarter of a glass of milk is heated with a slice of butter, chopped toffee (about 200 grams) and a couple of tablespoons of powder are poured in, and with stirring, everything is cooked until smooth.

Orange glaze

Interesting in that it is not cooked - however, like all zirus varieties. Juice is squeezed out of the orange, it should make four tablespoons. The yolks are separated from five eggs, whipped with juice until a dense foam, after which one and a half glasses of powder are gradually added. Cookies covered with this mass are placed in the oven for five minutes.

Lemon glaze

The zest is removed from the citrus - very thinly, with small shavings. Juice is squeezed out of the rest. The zest is mixed with half a glass of powder, the juice is poured into the mixture and the mixer is turned on until a dense thick foam is obtained. As you can see, even eggs are not needed here. This recipe makes the most suitable frosting for gingerbread cookies.

Lemon with honey

For such a coating, a tablespoon of thick honey is diluted with two tablespoons of hot (but not boiling) water. When it is completely dissolved, the liquid is poured into a glass of powdered sugar, stirred and brought on fire until the sugar dissolves. After removing, pour in two tablespoons of fresh lemon juice, knead the icing until smooth and apply to the cookies.