Ingredients for Simple Vanilla Icing Recipe

Series Summary

Christmas is a time filled with family get-togethers, gift shopping, colored lights, Bing Crosby singing Christmas songs, decorating the tree, and, most importantly, all kinds of food. Between Christmas dinner and endless church and office holiday parties, it's nearly impossible to celebrate the season without adding on a few pounds of Christmas cheer, perhaps in imitation of ol’ St. Nick. Whether it’s the Christmas goose, the fruit cake, the rum balls, egg nog, or the cookies that get you, this is the time of the year where you stop counting calories for just a moment, and start focusing on good times and happy memories.

Along with other well-known icons of the Christmas season—the tree, the presents, the manger scene, the three wise men, and the jolly bearded fat man himself—homemade cookies help us to celebrate some of the best times of our lives, spent with the ones we love. In these free holiday dessert videos, learn how to make a few icing recipes to decorate Christmas cookies with. Our expert will walk you through these easy recipes in the first half of the series. Then learn how to decorate several different cookies, including a Christmas tree, a snowman, and a candy cane.

Merry Christmas

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I am going to show you some really quick and easy icing recipes and how to decorate holiday cookies. Okay for our simple icing, we are just going to need two cups of powder sugar, one-half teaspoon of vanilla (really small amount), two tablespoons of regular milk and I've also got as an optional ingredient to make chocolate icing I've got one teaspoon of cocoa powder. I also right here have a small bowl to make everything in and to stir everything up, let's get started shall we. Okay this recipe is really really simple. All you do is take your vanilla, put it in the bottom of your bowl, take your milk and put that with your vanilla and then we are going to stir. Then you just add your powder sugar in. I wouldn't do it all at once because different powder sugars have different thickening capabilities so I would add about half in at first, knock all the lumps out. This is the kind of icing that you would use to drizzle over the cookies or also the kind of icing that you would see on a lot of cakes do this but you can also do on cookies. And you can adjust the thickness of this icing by either adding more powder sugar or more milk and right now you can almost see it is like cinnamon roll icing at this point, so add a little bit more. Actually, let's go ahead and add the rest of it. I am pretty sure I am going to need all of this to reach the consistency that I want to reach and if I make a mistake, I can always just go through and add a splash of milk to it and straighten it out. This icing is really good if you, as funny as it sounds, watching what you eat because there is no shortening in this icing. Basically you are just eating sugar, milk and vanilla. Some other frostings out there which I will show you in a little bit contain shortening or butter in them and those would be marketably more fattening. "