Chefs Essentials : 10 Cookie Decorating Hacks

 There is nothing quite like a warm cookie to satisfy the tastebuds! Most of the unique shapes don’t need the involvement of any cookie pressing tool.

You can achieve many of the fun cookie shapes with things you find around your own home. 

Here are 14 fun cookie decorating hacks to help you fill your next pan of cookies in the oven with fun and easy to formulate shapes.

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Cookie Roses

This might be the most creative of the bunch here. Cookie rose toppers are slightly more complex but worth the delight at the end.

Start with completely flattening out a piece of cookie dough with something hard and very flat, like a frying pan or a small wok.

Make sure the piece is very flat. Then do this again three more times. Next, layer the four flat pieces overlapping each other by about a quarter of the way cascaded vertically. They should resemble two overlapping number 8s at this point.

Next, starting from the bottom, begin rolling the bottom piece of dough. This will take the other three with it in a role sequentially. Once it is rolled up into a cannoli-like tube, gently press the middle with your finger to flatten it just a tad.

Follow this with slicing the rolled-up dough with a knife and separate the two halves. Next, stand these up on their now flat side, and you will see a beautiful rose shape on each. Feel free to unfurl the petals a bit. Repeat the process until you have filled up your cookie rack to your satisfaction.

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Seashell Cookies

You likely have a Tupperware container laying around somewhere.

If you do not, you can make a small investment in one, assure that it has a ridged top, with the ripples protruding diagonally from the center in a “sunshine” fashion.

Then all you need to do is roll up your cookie dough in a ball and press it to just outside the center. When pressing down to flatten your balled-up dough, make sure that only one edge is touching the center when it flattens out, and the rest is laying on top of the ridges.

Press firmly, and when you flip the dough back over, you will get the perfect shape of a seashell. Add it to your cookie pan, and in the oven, they go!

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Glass Print Cookies

This one is simple. Go and find every glass or glass mug with a shaped bottom.

Then, with several balled-up cookie dough balls on a cooking sheet, press the glass of choice on each of them firmly.

The cookie dough will flatten out with that particular shape on it. You can then have as many different cookie designs as you have differently bottomed glasses.

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Sunflowers

You will need an apple corer (a metal tool that you can place on top of apples and push down to slice the apple into equal slices for this style while the core remains in the middle).

First, flatten out a piece of cookie dough to a circular shape on the table, then gently apply pressure with the apple corer on top of it to make cuts but not through to the bottom.

Once done, tightly pinch the very edges of sliced pieces and what you will get is the cookie replica of a sunflower. Gently move these to the cookie sheet, and you are ready for sunflower cookie baking.

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Rainbow Flowers

For a fun and easy touch of rainbow colors in your cookies, you will need some freeze-dried fruits.

A raspberry variant, for instance, would be red, blueberry would be blue, and so on.

Use your imagination. Lightly dip a whisk into the freeze-dried powder of your colorful fruit of choice, then press that into your cookie dough to form a seven-pointed shape of that color imprinted right on top of that cookie.

The final colorful assortment makes for a cleverly designed 7-pointed shape to create a fantastic cookie top design.

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Chocolate Turtles

Roll up a standard size piece of chocolate cookie dough, then flatten it out with an oven rack.

This will create a checkered outline on top of it.

Next, roll up to five smaller (about a quarter of the size plain cookies dough balls, position them in a circumference slightly wider than the chocolate piece.

Then place the chocolate checkered as a topper on the set of 5 smaller ones, and gently press down. The result will resemble a shell of a turtle with four protruding feet and head. 

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Jam Flowers

Using the top side of a citrus juicer, gently press down into a cookie dough ball to flatten it with a 6-pronged shape .

 Fill the imprint with your choice of jam with a fine-nosed pipette or something of that exact nature.

Choose any jam flavor you prefer (strawberry, lemon, blueberry, etc.) to fill the ridges with the tasty cookie topper before sending them off to bake.