I love making sugar cookies all year round. It is such an easy and cost effective thing to do with little kids all the while it being such a rewarding activity to do together because we all get to eat the cookies that day and a few days after.
My 2 year old is having a week of being a tyrant so when we started to get ready to ice this batch of cookies things started to get a little dicey. I decided to quickly ice them in all white royal icing and then thought why couldn’t they use the food color gel as water colors? Well wouldn’t you know this is a thing people do already? Which I am so thankful for because I didn’t have to figure it out how to make the food gel work as water colors. However, this is the process I made up for my kids to make this a kid friendly activity with minimal clean up.
Here is what we did:
Prep
- We made sugar cookies using this Mrs. Fields Sugar Cookie Recipe.
- We let the cookies cool for about 2 hours
- We made icing using Light Corn Syrup. This was a first for me and it turned out so great and easy to use for both piping and flooding.
- I let the cookies dry on a rack over night.
Watercolor Station
Materials Used:
- Sugar Cookies iced and dried and hard
- Paint brushes specifically used for food purposes (Mine are Wilton)
- Little Cups
- Tooth Picks
- Food Color gels (Mine are Wilton)
- Liquid to mix the food coloring – this is up to you and what you are comfortable with
- I used kid table mats and sheets of wax paper for my kids to paint the cookies on.
Let’s Do It:
The next day we got our stations ready just as I would set up water color stations for the kids ( We water color a lot for an easy and fun inside activity).
I used medicine cups for individual colors because we have so many of those and it kept everything tidy and manageable for little hands. I added the food color gel to the cup with a tooth pick and a little bit of liquid. You can use a couple different types of liquid for this process. It is up to you to decide what you are comfortable with after doing research for yourself.
I had them use each cup as a paint pot because it really cut down on the amount of liquid used and the amount of mess. The clean up was so easy because of this.
Once they were done, we washed up and the cookies were left to dry again over night My daughter was packed a cookie in her lunch box that next morning.
Note. I would like to just say this is a really fun, and easy activity to do with your kids but this is definitely an activity that needs to be monitored with adult supervision no matter what type of liquid you are using. This is a self contained easy activity with adult supervision. I never once left my kids unattended while doing this project.
I hope you are enjoyed this idea and maybe use this as an activity with friends and family this upcoming holiday season or all year round. <3