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Easter Sugar Cookies are a soft, chewy sugar cookie decorated easily with colored frosting and simple piping tips. Kids and adults alike love to decorate and eat these sugar cookies!
Decorated Easter Cookies
Easter Sugar Cookies are a great way to bring a little festiveness to the table during the holiday parties. Imagine bringing in a nicely decorated plate of sugar cookies shaped like Easter eggs, bunnies, chickens, and carrots- you’ll look like a cookie-making expert and hear praises as everyone goes back for another… and another.
One of the best parts of Easter Sunday is getting together to have a feast and fun activities (like egg hunts) with churches, family, and friends. Whether you’re in it for religious reasons, or simply doing it because its a tradition, gathering with family and friends is always nice. Sharing a plate of Easter themed cookies with everyone is a great way to celebrate together.
Take it up a notch and make decorating Easter sugar cookies an activity for everyone to join in on. Make the sugar cookie recipe in advance and have little containers of colored sugar cookie frosting ready to go. Set up a table or area where everyone can decorate their cookies and you not only saved yourself all of that extra work but you made the day more enjoyable for everybody as well!
What’s in Easter Sugar Cookies?
Making sugar cookies for your Easter Celebration might just be the easiest dessert you make for the entire event!! The sugar cookies only include 6 ingredients, no refrigeration required, AND they keep shape. If that isn’t the perfect trifecta, I don’t know what is. 😉
- Butter: Use salted butter for this recipe. If you do not have salted butter on hand and only have unsalted, it is important to add a pinch or two of salt to the recipe to make up for the missing salt. We will need 1 cup of butter for this recipe.
- Granulated Sugar: We will also be needing 1 cup of the sugar. Equal parts sugar and butter make for the perfectly sweet sugar cookies.
- Vanilla Extract: While I absolutely love vanilla extract and use it 99.9% of the time, feel free to substitute with lemon extract if you want to give your cookie an extra spring-y taste.
- Egg: we will need one regular egg.
- Flour: Regular All purpose white flour is what you’ll want on hand when making this recipe. 3 cups total!
- Baking Powder: two teaspoons is all! This will help give the cookies a slight lift and make them soft.
- Sugar Cookie Frosting: You can decorate your sugar cookies with your favorite sugar cookie frosting. You could even use store-bought, canned frosting if you’d like! I always make mine from scratch because I think it tastes better, it is a semi-crusting buttercream (meaning you can bag or stack without a mess!), and really, it is so easy!! If you want to make your own, I’ll list the ingredients in the recipe card, but you can get all of the details and your questions answered in my Sugar Cookie Frosting post.
How to Make Easter Sugar Cookies
To make your sugar cookies absolutely successful there are a few things to keep in mind. First, the dough is so forgiving!! We are looking for the texture of fresh, soft play-doh. Humidity and climate can have some effect on the dough, so depending on where you live, you may need to add a tad more flour or even a little bit of water to get it to that extremely easy to work with consistency.
Next, remember when you are rolling out that your cookies will not spread, they will not rise. So the thickness of the dough when you cut the cookies will be the thickness of the cookies when they are finished cooking.
When gathering up the dough scraps, wet your hands and then ‘knead’ the dough until it is soft and playdoh like again. This dough is great to work with, there is no such thing as over kneading this dough!
It is very important to not over-bake the cookies. You will want to pull these cookies out of the oven before they start turning golden brown. If they turn brown, your cookies will still taste good, but the texture will be dry and crumbly vs soft and chewy. The key to insuring soft and chewy cookies is to check on the cookies often and pull them out when the tops of the cookies have puffed up slightly and the cookies no longer look glossy and wet.
Frosting Sugar Cookies
Frosting sugar cookies is my favorite part! I love decorating and frosting with buttercream because the taste is so much better than royal frosting. I frost most of my cookies with a piping bag and a size 2 or 3 tip. This is just a small round tip.
I use back and forth motions to fill in the shape of the cookie. You can use multiple colors on one cookie easily! You’ll just need multiple piping bags and tips. Eggs can turn out so fun!!
For the carrot cookies, I just piped orange in a back and forth motion from the top to the bottom and then I used green to vertically zig zag for the carrot tops.
How Long Do Easter Sugar Cookies Last?
If you’re hungry, they won’t last long! Haha! But if you keep the cookies stored in an airtight container on your counter they should last about 3-4 days before getting stale. Cookies are still edible at that point, but they may not be as great as they were when fresher.
Can I Freeze Sugar Cookies after baking them?
You can freeze unfrosted sugar cookies and be completely fine. I recommend freezing them flat on a baking sheet for at least an hour before stacking them together in a Ziploc bag. This will prevent them from sticking to each other and becoming one monstrous cookie mess. Then just thaw, frost, and eat as usual.
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Easter Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter , room temperature
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 egg
- 3 cups flour
- 2 tsp baking powder
Frosting
- 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 1/2 tbsp milk
- food coloring
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°.
- Cream together the butter and sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer for a full 3 minutes.
- Scrape sides and add in vanilla and egg. Mix until combined.
- Add flour and baking powder to the bowl. Mix slowly at first gradually getting faster until the dough comes together. The texture should be like Playdoh. Add a little flour or water if needed to get it to a soft, pliable consistency.
- Turn out onto a floured surface. Use a rolling pin and roll until about 1/4 inch thick. (The cookies will not rise while baking, they will not get thinner while baking. Roll out to your desired FINISHED thickness.)
- Use cookie cutters and cut out desired shapes. Transfer the cookies to a silicone lined cookie sheet.
- Bake at 350° for 6-8 minutes or until the centers are puffy and no longer glossy. Pull the cookies out of the oven BEFORE they start turning brown. If they turn brown, the cookie will be dry and 'crackery' instead of soft and chewy.
- Allow to cool completley before frosting.
- To make the frosting, cream the butter until smooth. Slowly add in the powdered sugar 1 cup at a time, alternating with the liquid until everything has been added and the frosting is smooth. You can adjust the texture and thickness by adding a little more milk if you'd like it thinner or adding a little more powdered sugar if you'd like it thicker.
- To frost the carrots, using orange frosting in a piping bag with a size 2 tip, use a horizontal zig zag motion starting at the top of the cookie, going down. Then use a green frosting in a piping bag with a size 2 tip and a vertical zig zag motion for frost the carrot tops.
