Snowflake Cookies Tutorial

These might be my favorite Christmas cookie, though it's been a while since I made them! They look super fancy, but are easy to make. I think it took me about 15 minutes to cut the stencil and decorate the entire batch of cookies! Follow along with the steps below to make your own ~

1) Start with some plain sugar cookies. You can make them from scratch, slice & bake, or even just buy some pre-made. 

2) Follow my snowflake cutting tutorial to fold the paper for your stencil (through step 5). One you have it folded, hold the point to the center of a cookie and make a mark where the edge is. 

3) Follow the template below to draw your snowflake shape. Along one edge, draw a thin bar, ending just below that mark. Draw two angled bars coming off of that, about twice the thickness of the first bar. (You can see I made a little halfway mark on my bar to gauge the size) Below those, draw another angled line that goes all the way across. And then about an inch above your original mark, draw a line all the way across. 

4) Cut out your stencil along those lines, and it will look similar to this. Carefully erase your pencil lines before unfolding (optional).

5) Unfold your stencil and bend the folds in the opposite direction to help flatted it out. If you want it super flat you can iron it, but it is OK if it is a little wobbly.

6) Lay your stencil on top of a cookie and sprinkle cinnamon over the top. (If needed, you can hold it down a little, just try not to shift it.) Make sure you've filled in all of the little 'branches' before removing.

7) Carefully lift the stencil off of the cookie and dump the cinnamon from your stencil in a bowl. I like to quickly flip my cookie upside down over the bowl too, and then blow on the cookie with a quick 'puff' to remove the excess cinnamon. When you are done, you can pour the cinnamon from the bowl back into the shaker to use later. The cinnamon on the cookie will darken a bit as it sits.

Repeat on the rest of your cookies & you are done! I always seems like these shouldn't be so simple, like the stencil won't work for some reason, but after three+ batches I haven't had one cookie get messed up yet.

While I normally encourage experimentation with ingredients, on my first batch I tried making half with powdered sugar and kept inhaling it and choking every time I tried to eat one! Colored sugars may work, but are much larger & might need icing to stick. The cinnamon works wonderfully though, and gives the cookies a lovely Snickerdoodle flavor. Let me know if you give it a try!