Cookie Christmas Tree – Simply Styled Inspo

This Cookie Christmas tree looks impressive and makes a wonderful centrepiece or addition to a dessert table. I’ve made this 3D tree many times and have come up with all the tips and tricks to making this adorable holiday treat a little easier. It would certainly make a great hostess gift for a party and half the fun is taking it apart!

I used a sugar cookie recipe, included here, you could also try doing a gingerbread cookie or any recipe that is sturdy enough to take on all the stacking. For decorating, I used Royal icing but you could also buy a premixed package as a shortcut. You will need the star cookie cutter set for this recipe, see link below. The set includes 10 star cookie cutters but in order to make a taller tree, I doubled the amount to add extra height.

Sugar cookie and royal icing recipes adapted from http://canadianliving.com

Sugar cookie ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1 egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
2 3/4 all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tartar
Pinch salt

Royal icing ingredients:

3 tbsp meringue powder
3 2/3 cups icing sugar

Sugar cookie directions:

Grease 2 baking sheets and preheat oven to 375°F.
In large bowl, beat butter with icing sugar until fluffy; beat in egg and vanilla.
In separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, cream of tartar and salt.
Stir into butter mixture in 3 additions.
Divide in half; flatten into discs and wrap individually. Refrigerate for 1 hour or up to 1 day.
Remove from the fridge, dust each disc with flour, roll out to 1/4 inch thickness.
Begin cutting out the five small star shapes (the top of the cookie tree). Repeat until you have two of each of the small shapes, ten cookies in total.
Place on cookie sheet 1 inch apart and bake for aprox. 6 min. (watching closely).
For the next set of shapes, place larger cookie cutter over the dough and carefully place a smaller cutter on the inside in order to cut out the centre of the cookie so it bakes evenly (see pics).
Repeat until you have double the amount of the larger cookies, about ten cookies in total.
For the largest size cutter, you may not have enough dough to make two, but one cookie will be enough for the base.
Place on cookie sheet 1 inch apart and bake for approx 6-8 min. (watching closely).

Royal icing directions:

In bowl, beat meringue powder with 1/3 cup water until foamy, about 2 minutes.
Add sugar, beat until stiff, about 6 minutes.
Cover with damp cloth until ready to fill piping bag.
Makes about 1 1/2 cups.

Once all the cookies are baked and cooled, the fun part begins with the assembly! Organize all the cookies by shape, from largest to smallest. Prepare piping bag with the icing, I used Wilton icing tip #3 to ice the cookies together and icing tip #2 to pipe the decorations. To assemble, simply pipe around towards the enter of the back of the cookie and work your way up until you have all the pieces stacked together. As you stack the cookies, invert the shapes, so you have each cookie alternating to add height.

Once all the cookies are stacked and iced together, you can begin decorating! I used piping tip #2 but you can choose any design you like. I just piped a thin border around each cookie and placed a small dot in the centre of each cookie star tip. Once all completed, a little dusting of icing sugar to finish it all off!