Decorated Butterfly Cookies with Easy Royal Icing
These brightly colored, show-stopping decorated sugar cookies use the Monarch Butterfly as inspiration for their design. Use any combination of your favorite colors or tailor them to a certain theme. Follow my step by step instructions in the recipe and the photos / video in my post, and you will find they are much easier than they look.
Equipment
- Butterfly Cookie Cutter (See Notes)
- 4 squeeze bottles
- 4 sets of couplers (see Ingredient and Equipment list, above)
- #1 or #2 and #3 piping tips
- toothpicks, pointed wooden skewers or a metal "scribing needle" (see photo in post)
Ingredients
- 1 recipe Vanilla Orange Sugar Cookies
- 1 recipe Royal Icing For Decorating Cookies
- Black, orange and yellow or pink and purple gel paste food coloring (see Ingredient and Equipment list, above)
- lemon juice
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Instructions
Prepare the Cookies and Icing
- Cut out and bake butterfly-shaped sugar cookies according to my Vanilla Orange Sugar Cookie Recipe (or another good sugar cookie recipe.)
- Prepare one batch for my Royal Icing Recipe for Cookie Decorating.
- Divide the icing equally among four bowls. Using the gel paste, tint one portion black, one portion pink, one portion purple, and leave the remaining portion white. (Note: The pink and purple icings are interchangeable with other colors, like orange and yellow, as shown in my photos.)
- Thin the icing with lemon juice, a few teaspoons at at time, stirring after each addition, until it has the consistency of cool honey or hair gel. If you drizzle a ribbon of icing in to the bowl, it should be completely smooth in about 15 seconds. (See my Royal Icing post for more details about this "two step" consistency.)
- Transfer all of the icings to squeeze bottles. If using piping tips, place a #1 or #2 tip on the white icing, and a #3 tip on the remaining icings.
Decorate the Cookies
- Working with one cookie at a time, use the black icing to outline the upper and lower sections on the left wing of a butterfly. Repeat on the right wing so that the cookie is fully outlined in four sections.
- Flood the upper left section of the butterfly with one of your colored icings (pink is shown in my example), followed by the upper right section.
- Using black icing, pipe a line around the inside of both upper pink sections, following the contour of the outline.
- Place the end of your toothpick on the outer black outline and drag it through the pink icing and inner black line, towards the center of the pink icing. Repeat several more times, working around the pink section in a counterclockwise direction. Do the same for the upper wing section.
- Repeat steps 2-4 for the bottom sections of the butterfly, using your second color (purple in my example.)
- Using the white icing, pipe dots on the black outline of the wings, spacing the dots evenly around the top, sides, and bottoms, as well as on the lines that divide the pink and purple sections.
- Using the black icing, pipe the butterfly's head in the center section, along with its long, thin body, attaching it to the wings. Add two thin antennae on top of the head.
- Repeat for all remaining sugar cookies. Let cookies dry at least 6 hours or overnight before serving.
Video
Notes
- For my decorated cookies that have details like these butterflies, I like to use a 3.5 to 5 inch cutter.
- Once decorated and dried, cookies will keep at room temperature for about 1 week (depending on your humidity levels.) Store them in an airtight container or tightly covered.
- Freeze decorated cookies for up to 2 months. Place them in single layers in an airtight container separated by parchment paper. Defrost cookies in the container (still covered) at room temperature so that condensation doesn't build up.
Nutrition
Calories: 165kcal | Carbohydrates: 15g | Protein: 2g | Fat: 8g | Saturated Fat: 5g | Cholesterol: 27mg | Sugar: 6g
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