5 Cookie Decorating Hacks That Are Festive For Fall

With its bright, festive colors and two major celebrations of Halloween and Thanksgiving, fall can be considered a prelude to, if not the actual start of, the holiday season. And one of the hallmarks of hosting autumnal parties is often a tray of delicious seasonally decorated cookies. However, cookie decorating can seem intimidating to the non-professionals among us.

Worry not. There's a handful of easy-to-learn hacks you can use to make decorating your own fall cookie spread easier. Some can be used to add ridges, texture, and height variation to your cookies. Others involve drawing features directly on the surface. 

If this icing artistry remains too great of a challenge, there are some autumnal cookies that almost anyone can assemble from a handful of store-bought ingredients. One gourmet-looking autumn treat even requires no heat source and can be assembled in just two steps. It doesn't get any easier than that!

Ice your fall sugar cookies like a professional by first outlining the features you want in icing and letting them dry before carefully adding more within the lines. The result should be clean ridges with a smooth texture, as can be seen in the pumpkin cookies above. And don't be afraid to use the cookie cutter as a guide, they're training wheels every sugar cookie beginner needs.

Not the best with a piping bag? No problem. You can use edible markers on any cookie with a smoothly iced surface to draw in details by hand — or add solid blocks of color with more control than icing can allow.

A maple leaf cookie cutter isn't the most common kitchen item, but you can still make your own, in a sense. Buy un-iced maple leaf cookies (or any other unusual seasonal shape) and ice them yourself at home. Consider topping them with edible glitter made of food-safe ingredients like sugar and cornstarch. (Just make sure the label uses the word "edible.")

Hershey's starts preparing for Halloween in the springtime, and you can harvest some fruits of this months-long labor with ultra-easy acorn cookies. Use store-bought cookie icing to glue the flat bottoms of Hershey Kisses to the bottoms of mini vanilla wafers, and again to glue a peanut butter or chocolate chip on top of the wafer. 

The long, slender shape of biscotti are good approximations of narrow-leaf tree species like willows. Coat the biscotti in a gently melted store-bought icing of your choice (willow leaves generally turn yellow, brown, or red) and allow them to cool. You can also pipe icing or molten chocolate down the middle as the leaf's central vein.