Ingredients for a Holiday Cookie Tree Recipe

Series Summary

The great thing about cookies is that you can eat them with your hands, they can be made out of a variety of sweet ingredients and you can decorate them with anything you want. Thanks to the discovery of sugar back in the Persian Empire, people have been making sweet desserts for centuries. Cookies are just one example of the goodness that sugar brings, but it might just be the best example of that goodness. Aside from sugar, cookies can have a variety of ingredients to give them a unique flavor, including spices, chocolate, butter, peanut butter, nuts or dried fruit. While chocolate chip cookies are the most well known of cookies, sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies and snickerdoodles are also popular favorites.

In this free video series, our expert will show you how to make a cookie tree. This is a great baking project for the holidays to share with kids and family. Our expert will teach you how to make the dough and bake the sugar cookie base for our tree shaped cookie. You will also learn how to make homemade frosting and decorate the cookie tree with that frosting. Finally, get tips on how to add additional decorations and making a chocolate tree trunk for your holiday cookie tree.

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Josiah Owen with Expert Village, and today we're going to be talking about making a cookie tree. For our ingredients for our cookie tree, we're going to need 1/4 cups pecans, 5 small caramels, assorted green and red M&Ms, preferably the holiday addition, 1 1/2 cups chocolate morsels, 3/4 cup soft butter, 1 cup white sugar, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, 2 eggs, 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla, and with that we'll need 2 teaspoons and then 1/2 a teaspoon, 1 cup shortening, 4 cups powdered sugar, 4 tablespoons milk, and then red and green food coloring."