Thanksgiving Cookies | How To Decorate

Thanksgiving Cookies | How To Decorate

Let’s make DELICIOUS Thanksgiving Cookies You Will LOVE! Get ready for the most delicious no-spread Thanksgiving sugar cookies you’ve ever tasted and the most delightful Thanksgiving Turkey cookie decorations imaginable!

Join us as we share our secret family sugar cookie recipe and our homemade buttercream frosting recipe as we show how to best decorate Thanksgiving sugar cookies shaped like turkeys. This easy cookies tutorial will have you making beautiful sugar cookies in no time!

You start by using your turkey shaped cookie cutters to bake the perfect turkey sugar cookies. This is the basis for these amazing Thanksgiving cookies. 

All of the recipe and baking instructions are located right here in the link below:

Secret Family Recipe: Best No-Spread Sugar Cookies

Be sure to follow them precisely and your cookies will turn out perfectly every time.

After the cookies have cooled for an appropriate amount of time, then you can start the truly great part…

Then onto the wonderful and super fun decorating!

Thanksgiving Cookies | Decorating Instructions

And the first step is just to frost with chocolate frosting, or you can use my homemade buttercream frosting recipe and dye it brown.

And of course, you’re welcome to do a royal icing, which would be self-leveling, but we love to do it this way, which is more kid friendly. It’s just honestly, it’s a little more fun. It’s a little thicker frosting. And I find that it holds the candy corn we’re about to put on better than doing a real pristine royal icing.

And you usually don’t have to be as precise or precious on these edges where the turkey’s beak and tail are. We will be adding some candy to those spots. So, liberally frost each turkey cookie with your brown frosting

Then we will add our feathers and our tail feather to each turkey with the autumn mix candy corn (the candy corn we add here consists of orange and brown colors). You can usually use 5 candy corn for the feathers and 1 candy corn for the tail feather. 

Then we use the yellow and orange candy corn for the beak. But you need to cut off a little of the orange so it’s the appropriate sized beak. 

Next we have these little candy eyeballs here. They are so cute. Just stick one in where the eye would be (right next to the beak).

You could stop here if you wanted to. It would be a very successful cookie. But we’re not going to stop there because  we’re going to be writing the names of our guests for our Thanksgiving dinner directly onto the cookie and adding a waddle after the frosting hardens a bit so that we can add a second layer to it.

So, I want to make sure it’s a nice smooth surface to write onto. Just go over the frosting in this writing area very carefully to make sure it’s smooth (feel free to do this earlier in the process, now that you know what you’re doing). You will not write on them until they’ve hardened a little bit. Usually we do this overnight. 

And then you can either chill them in the refrigerator or just leave them out overnight.

After the cookies have dried well enough, we’re going to have our ready to use right-on gels. And so now we are just going to do the waddle on these.

You can use a red writing food gel or buttercream frosting dyed red with a piping bag and a writing tip and add the waddle just below the beak.

Please note: You should always make extra cookies for additional guests that might show up (or your primary guests wanting seconds!). Just add the waddle to these cookies.

Decorating these cookies the day before thanksgiving is the best idea for timing.

And so now we’re going to be writing names on them, which is a tradition in our family. Everybody gets their own cookie with their name on it. Every guest at the Thanksgiving table.

You can also add one for the center of the platter that says “Gobble Gobble”!

Thanksgiving Cookies | How Do They Taste?

First of all, I cannot believe how absolutely adorable these turned out. And they are absolutely delicious!

The candy corn really brings out the flavor. I hope you love these cookies as much as we do and that these become your new family tradition!

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. 

Please note: Though the frosting and writing gel will harden a bit, these will not be stackable cookies. Best to keep them in one layer at all times.

(NOTE: if you don’t want chocolate frosting taste, make this buttercream frosting and dye it with brown food coloring):

🧁Buttercream Frosting Recipe🧁