Yesterday’s creation for my good friend Jason as a thank you for taking our family picture for our Christmas card this year.  I used the Wilton Cookie Tree Kit:

The kit isn’t too expensive, like $10, although last year around this time I got it on sale for $5.  It wasn’t all that hard to make but it was time consuming.  I’ll give you the Wilton recipe for Large Roll-Out Cookies which came with the kit and is delicious and I’ll also give you the Quick-Pour Icing Recipe which also came with the kit and makes the cookie tree and regular sugar cookies look so professional.

Large Roll-Out Cookie Recipe

5 1/2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons salt

2 cups (4 sticks) butter, softened

3 cups sugar

2 eggs

1 tablespoon vanilla

1 teaspoon almond extract

1  Preheat oven to 350.

2  Combine flour, baking powder and salt in bowl and set aside.

3  Beat butter and eggs until light and fluffy.  Beat in eggs and extracts.  Add flour mixture to butter mixture 1 cup at a time, mixing after each addition.  Do not chill dough.  Divide dough into 4 balls.

4  On floured surface, roll each ball into a circle approximately 12″ in diameter and 1/8″ thick.  Dip cookies in flour.  Bake similar sized cookies on ungreased cookie sheet 8 – 11 minutes or until cookies are lightly browned.

The instructions said you would need this whole recipe to make the tree but the tree only took about half of the dough and so I made about 5 dozen sugar cookies with the rest of the dough (which found there way to some neighbor’s houses last night):

Quick-Pour Icing Recipe

5 cups sifted powdered sugar

1/4 cup milk (I was out of milk so used heavy whipping cream instead)

1/4 cup light corn syrup

Combine sugar and milk, stirring until mixed thoroughly.  Add corn syrup and mix well.

You can frost 2 ways – first, you can put a spoonful of icing on the cookies and spread with a knife or second (my preference), you can dip the cookies in the icing which worked better for me as it gave the cookies that professional looking smooth top.