How to Decorate a Red Teacup Sugar Cookie with Royal Icing

Directions

• 1

  Bake and cool cookies before decorating. Get Ann Clark's no-fail sugar cookie recipe here. For a rich and chocolatey twist, try our Chocolate cookie recipe here. Make sure cookies are fully cooled. If they are warm, the icing will run off of them. Make royal icing. Learn how to mix different consistencies of royal icing here>>
  
  Prepare the following icing colors:
  
  Piping Consistency:
  Red
  
  Flood Consistency:
  Red
  Brown
  White

  
• 2Outline the three sections of the teacup as shown with red piping consistency icing: the main part of the cup, the base, and the handle. Also create definition around the rim of the cup as shown. You can pipe some squiggles of red piping consistency icing in the body of the cookie, this will help your flood icing to set up nicely and prevent it from collapsing.
  
• 3

  Use brown flood consistency icing to flood the top of the teacup to look like tea or cocoa. Pipe a few dots of white flood consistency icing into the "tea" while the brown flood is still wet. Use your scribe tool or toothpick to gently mix the white and brown together, making creamy swirls. Moving the icing around will also help to get rid of any air bubbles that may be in your icing.
  
  Allow this area to dry until just crusting over before moving to the next step. This may take up to 60 minutes. You can speed the process up by placing the cookies next to or under a fan set to a medium speed.

  
• 4

  Next, flood the main part of the teacup with red flood consistency icing. While the flood is still wet, pipe some white dots using your white flood consistency icing into the red flood. This wet-on-wet technique will allow the dots to blend into the red base flood.
  
  Wait for the main body of the teacup to dry until just crusting over. Again, you can speed up the process by placing your cookies near a fan. Once your red flood with white dots has crusted over, flood the handle and base of the teacup.

  
• 5

  Tea time anyone?