How To Decorate Butterfly Cookies

These marbled butterfly cookies are perfect for showtime timers with royal icing, every bit they are piece of cake to make and colorful to look at. The sugar cookie dough is as well easy to put together with standard pantry ingredients and makes succulent cookies.

There are a lot of ways to decorate butterfly cookies.

You can make them truthful to life with butterfly colors, y'all can add all sorts of fun designs not seen in the wild, or y'all can go the extra mile and marble them.

These marbled butterfly sugar cookies are incredible to make, become keen for special events like butterfly birthday parties, and they are really piece of cake to practice even though they look detailed.

In this marbled butterfly cookie tutorial, I'll evidence yow how to make the marbled butterfly cookies, how to decorate the marbled butterfly cookies and how to accomplish the marbling effect for even more fun.

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What Ingredients Do I Need for Marbled Butterfly Cookies?

To become started, you'll want to gather all of the ingredients to both brand and decorate the marbled butterfly cookies.

The cookie base is a carbohydrate cookie cut-out base of operations, equally opposed to a normal sugar cookie base of operations.

This is fantastic because it prevents the dough from spreading due to the spooky required and the interactions of the ingredients.

You don't want to put them in the oven and find that you have blobs instead of butterflies.

For the dough, you'll need: icing sugar, granulated sugar, flour, butter, eggs, vanilla extract, salt, and baking powder.

The next step is royal icing, which you can brand while the cookies are blistering.

This is fabricated up of meringue pulverization, icing saccharide, water, and vanilla extract for flavoring.

I similar to brand my royal icing with meringue powder equally I detect it easy to use and store, and it can be consumed past everyone without any fear dissimilar egg whites which can exist unsafe for pregnant women.

Tools You'll Need for Marbled Butterfly Cookies

You'll also want some baking tools for the marbled butterfly cookies, which include:

different color nutrient coloring – gel food coloring is always meliorate than liquid for icing
rolling pin guides to roll dough – I use these ones
toothpick or scribe for adjusting the icing
blistering tray
blistering paper or silicone baking mat – this is the best brand

How Far Ahead Tin can I Make Marbled Butterfly Cookies?

Many people want to make cookies ahead of fourth dimension for a special issue, and you lot can make these up to 2 weeks ahead of time and store them at room temperature in an airtight container.

To refresh when information technology'southward fourth dimension to consume, put a slice of bread in with them for a bit – sounds weird, but it works!

If yous want to make them farther than that, y'all tin can brand the bases and freeze them for up to 3 months.

I don't recommend freezing imperial icing or fully decorated stars because the royal icing tin can freeze a little bit funny and in general I find that the chances you'll ruin your decorated cookies are much higher than if you lot just freeze the bases.

Why Purple Icing?

Royal icing can be intimidating to people who haven't used it before, only it's one of the best icings to get a smooth finish and marbles beautifully.

Buttercream is an option for some people who only want basic icing on meridian of the cookie, merely you won't get the crisp lines and the control you get with imperial icing.

When you lot're making royal icing, employ the royal icing recipe and brand sure that you get the consistency y'all desire.

I adopt to employ a single consistency, about 12 seconds, which is measured by the time it takes for the line to disappear afterward you lot draw one in the icing with a pocketknife.

Seriously, just count it out!

If it's less than that, you'll find it too runny, and if it gets a lot more than that, the icing may non be sparse plenty to too utilise as a "flood" which is the base of the cookie.

Utilise pipage bags to disperse the royal icing, or you lot tin can even utilize a sandwich bag with the tip cut off if you're really desperate.

Always cut the tip small at first, as you don't want a big opening like you exercise for other icings.

Smaller gives you more control, and if it'south too small, you can always cut more off – but you lot can't cut less off!

Pipe by keeping the tip near an inch off of the cookie and letting the icing drip downward slowly, rather than keeping the tip right on the cookie.

It sounds counterintuitive, merely keeping the piping tip further away actually does give you lot more control.

Tips on the Cut-Out Sugar Cookie Dough

The saccharide cookie recipe you should use for these marbled butterfly cookies is the cut-out sugar cookie recipe, which is formulated to allow for the cookies to keep their shape and not spread.

If you don't follow it and chill your cookie dough, then your cookies will spread in the oven and no longer be butterflies.

When you're cutting out the cookie dough, make sure to lightly flour your cutter and endeavour not to pull on the dough too much – this can cause warping that yous won't run into until the cookie is baked.

How to Decorate Marbled Butterfly Royal Icing Cookies

Butterfly cookies are then easy to do marbling with, and they create a gorgeous wing-like ornamentation.

All y'all demand to do is outline the butterfly in whatever color you want.

I chose white to brand the colors pop more, but you can simply every bit easily practice this with other colors.

Then, inundation the base of the cookie with the same color.

Immediately, while the icing is yet wet, draw horizontal lines with other colors of icing across the wings.

When you've finished, take a scribe or toothpick and drag it through the lines, so from the top of the butterfly to the lesser and back up over again.

Leave nearly a centimeter's worth of infinite between the lines.

And that's actually it – information technology will create the marbling effect you're looking for and expect great!

You can use random colors if you lot want a more than haphazard appearance, or alternate colors, or just use ane color to brand your lines and 1 to flood.

Information technology'due south completely up to y'all and how you desire the final product to expect.

Prep Time one 60 minutes

Full Time ane hour

Ingredients

24 cookies using cut-out carbohydrate cookie dough
one batch of royal icing, separated in the colors you desire to decorate

Instructions

Bake the butterfly cookies using the sugar cut-out cookie recipe
Make a batch of regal icing using the purple icing recipe
Separate out the purple icing into as many colors as you lot want to decorate with and put into pipe bags
Outline the butterfly in white
Immediately flood the cookie with white
Immediately describe horizontal lines across the butterfly in whatsoever colors you want
Utilize a scribe or a toothpick to drag lines vertically through the lines most one centimeter autonomously
Let dry out for 12 hours