Fireworks Cookies

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It's that time of year again... the celebration of our nation's independence! I am excited about this year's July 4th because I am going up to visit my family who lives in Virginia near the nation's capitol. It has been too long since I've seen them! Hopefully I will get to see some of DC while I am up there.

One thing I am going to bring with me is a batch of these festive cookies. I saw them in the Martha Stewart Living magazine and knew that I had to make them. I believe that on the 4th of July you not only have to wear red, white, & blue, but you must also have these colors be part of what you eat! These are so fun and they are actually not that difficult. I'm going to confess something here: I used a Betty Crocker mix for the sugar cookies instead of home making them... come on, it's a time saver and they taste just as good!


Here's the how-to:
1. Using a batch of royal icing, separate it into 3 bowls and use food coloring to dye one of the bowls blue and one of them red. Then scoop the blue icing into a ziploc bag, and the same with the red. Cut a very small hole in one of the corners (you don't want it to be too big!). Martha Stewart would tell you to use squeeze bottles for this, but the ziploc bags worked fine for me.

2. Spread an even layer of white icing over a cookie, leaving a 1/4-inch border (I just used a knife here).

3. Immediately squeeze a red or blue dot in the center of cookie. Then pipe concentric rings of colors around the center dot. You can do all one color, or alternate red and blue here.

4. Immediately drag a toothpick through the colors to create bursts, starting from the center dot and working toward the edge. You can do this all the way around, or you can also alternate dragging inward and outward as you work around the cookie. Let dry. Repeat with remaining cookies.

These were so much fun to make! Of course I don't quite have the Martha finesse down pat, so mine did not turn out as gorgeous as hers. But let's be honest, she probably had to go through like 8 batches of cookies to get hers looking that perfect, right??

Hope you enjoy these! What's your favorite 4th of July tradition?