Frosted Easter Egg Cookies

Course: Dessert

Cuisine: Easter, North American

Prep Time: 20

Cook Time: 12

Chill & Decorating Time: 1 30

Total Time: 2 2

Servings: cookies

Calories: 311kcal

Author: Lord Byron's Kitchen

Frosted Easter Egg Cookies are prepared with a light and airy shortbread cookie base consisting of only three ingredients! Once cooled, they are frosted with an easy to make royal icing, which hardens and crisps when dried. Topped with sprinkles or simply frosted with whimsical patterns, it's hard to eat only one of these cookies!

Print Recipe

Ingredients

For the Cookies:

2 cups salted butter, softened
1 cup confectioner's sugar
4 cups all-purpose flour

For the Frosting:

3 large egg whites
4 cups confectioner's sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
water
sprinkles
food colouring

Instructions

Use a mixer to beat the butter and sugar until well blended in a large bowl. Then, add the flour and blend into the butter mixture until just incorporated. Do not over mix!
Separate the dough into two equal portions and wrap them well in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 15 minutes. In the meantime, preheat your oven to 350 degrees F and prepare a baking sheet by lining it with a silicone mat or parchment paper. Set aside.
Remove the dough from the fridge. Working with one batch at a time, roll the dough between two sheets of parchment paper to 1/4 inch thick.
Use a cookie cutter to cut out the desired shapes. Transfer the dough to the baking sheet using a flat, slotted, metal spatula. Leave 2 inches between each cookie. Bake for 12 minutes. Remove from oven promptly and allow cookies to rest for 2 minutes before transferring to a wire cooling rack to finish cooling. Re-roll the left over dough, and bake the next batch.
Once cookies are cooled, prepare the royal icing by beating the egg whites in a bowl until lightly frothy, about 90 seconds. Add in the sifted confectioner’s sugar one cup at a time, beating well to incorporate into the egg whites. Finally, beat in the vanilla extract.
Prepare both an outlining and a flooding icing from the batch of icing you just made. See the notes section below.
Once the cookies are decorated, allow the royal icing to dry until set up. The icing will be firm to the touch. Store in a cookie tin on your countertop. Enjoy!

Notes

There are two basic types of royal icing. The first allows you to outline the cookies and the second type is for flooding in the spaces that you just outlined with the firmer, outlining icing. When you finish making the batch of royal icing, it should pour in a thick stream from a spoon back into the bowl. For outlining consistency, allow 20-25 seconds for the icing to smooth out. The lines created by the steaming will not totally disappear.

For flooding, you need a thinner royal icing. To do this, add small amounts of water to the icing, mixing well after each addition. When you can pour the icing from a spoon back into the bowl and the ribbon of icing settles flat in about 10 seconds, (or the pour lines are no longer visible) the flooding icing is ready.

For each colour you need, you will need two bowls of icing. You will need a bowl of outline and a bowl of flooding icing. Portion out what you think you will need of each colour into separate bowls. Keep the bowls covered at all times to prevent the icing from drying out! Tint with food colouring. Remove the amount of flooding icing from that bowl and add water until the desired consistency is reached. Do this for all of the colours you need. In the case of these Frosted Easter Egg Cookies, you will only need pink and blue.

*The nutritional information is an approximation only and will be determined by the size of your cookie and how much icing and/or sprinkles were used to decorate them.

Nutrition