Cookie Craft Christmas: Dozens of Decorating Ideas for a Sweet Holiday »

Valerie Peterson is a writer with over fifteen years of experience working with cookbooks. She grew up in Yonkers, New York, where her second favorite toy was her Easy-Bake Oven.

Janice Fryer is a Pastry Arts graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City. A California native and a New Yorker at heart, she lives with a crazy cat and an even crazier dog. Keeping them from eating her creations is always a lively challenge.

Make every Christmas a cookie craft Christmas! The holidays offer just the right combination of cold weather and family togetherness for cookie crafters to elevate their skills to showstopping new heights. With more than 60 new Christmas cookie designs, along with festive New Year’s cookies and lovely Hanukkah treats, Cookie Craft Christmas delivers colorful inspiration to cookie decorators just when they need it most.

Each spread features a full-page, close-up photograph of one cookie cutter shape with detailed decorating instructions on the facing page. Some pages feature one gloriously decorated cookie, while others might feature two or three interpretations of the same shape — ornaments in complementary colors, Christmas trees decorated in varying styles, or gingerbread men wearing a rainbow of colors and patterns.

Decorating instructions are as simple as tinting cookie dough green before baking Christmas trees or as intricate as piping hair on a gingerbread grandma, creating a frilly pattern for her apron, and decorating her dress using a pretty feathering technique. Techniques are described in full in a Decorating Glossary, and cookie and icing recipes are included.

Fresh inspiration and fabulous decorating ideas fill the pages of this handy little sourcebook. It’s the perfect gift for anyone who has ever picked up a pastry bag.

Publisher's Note:

The chart on page 17 gives ingredient quantities for making royal icing with meringue powder. Please note that you should use only 4 teaspoons of meringue powder for 2 cups of confectioners' sugar in both the piping and the flooding recipes. (The table incorrectly gives the meringue powder quantity as 4 tablespoons.) This will be corrected in reprints of the book.

Our thanks to an alert reader for finding and pointing out this error and our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.