I consider myself to be a pretty good artist. My education and former profession is in the design field and I’m pretty good at craft stuff. I also think I’m a decent cook, so I figured with those two things going for me, decorating fancy sugar cookies would be right up my alley. Imagine my surprise (not to mention shattered ego and broken self-confidence) when I attempted to play around with royal icing for the first time and my little masterpieces looked more like something in a 1st grader’s art pile. So I gave up on ever decorating fancy-schmancy cookies again.
That was until I met THIS style of icing. Now my confidence is back in tact because even my very first batch turned out beautifully! It’s super forgiving, easy to use, and it actually tastes good!
The benefit of using an icing like this is that it dries to a solid sheen, making the cookies stackable and packable- perfect for giving or displaying on a platter. With a soft, fluffy buttercream, there’s just no easy way to give them away so you have to eat them all yourself (which may be the plan, right??)
Ingredient Notes
- Simple Ingredients – All you need for this icing is powdered sugar, milk, corn syrup, and extract of your choice (I use almond, but vanilla is great, too.) And we all know that corn syrup is not the same thing as high-fructose corn syrup, right?? Like, we don’t have to have this conversation again? Okie-dokie then.
- Cookies – You’ll need cookies to decorate! I use The Best Sugar Cookies.
How to Decorate Using Glace Icing
Whisk up some powdered sugar, milk, corn syrup, and extract of your choice and you’ll have a nice glaze-y consistency. You’re going to use the same recipe for both glazing and piping. The way it is right now is the consistency you want for glazing. It’s smooth and thin and it easily runs off the whisk in a pretty thin drizzle.
Now, you have some options of where to go from here. You can simply spoon this icing onto your cookies and gently spread out with a spoon and be done! In fact, one of the easiest ways is to just quickly spread and let it go completely off the edges like this:
While the icing is wet, you can mix colors and create all kinds of fun things. Try glazing in one color and then adding other colors from a piping bag with a very small, plain opening, and drag the designs with a toothpick to create gorgeous works of art.
You honestly can’t make an ugly cookie here.
Another method is to pipe an edge around your cookie, and then wait for a few minutes for it to firm up. When you’re piping, you’ll want to add a bit more powdered sugar to thicken up the icing just a bit.
Once hardened a a little, go back in with your glaze and fill in the space. That outline will work as a dam and give you nice clean lines.
Wet-on-wet icing will marble and swirl together. I actually did this whole batch this way because I didn’t have time to let mine dry very much.
If you want to pipe designs on top of your cookies, you’ll want to wait until your first glazing layer is dry to the touch, which can take a couple of hours. You’ll want to leave them out un-covered to dry. You can see a great example of this method in this post, where I made darling little Owl Cookies.
I also used that method when making these Valentine Cookie Pops.
Either way, you’ll want to let these cookies dry all the way before stacking or handling too much.
They develop a sheen and are dry to the touch after a couple hours, but they’ll need to really dry for most of the day, or overnight to be completely dry.
Whenever I update ancient posts like this one, I always feel like I’m erasing a bit of history when I delete old, outdated photos, so I’m going to leave a few of the originals here- just because. 
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do these keep? The icing will last longer than the cookies. For most cookies, I would say they are best eaten within a couple of days. Store stacked in an airtight container.
Related Recipes
Did You Try This?
I’d love to hear from you! Snap a picture and tag me on Instagram, then come back and give this recipe a rating!
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Glacé Icing
- Total Time: Varies Depending on Method
Description
These sugar cookies are as delicious as they are beautiful! Such a fun way to decorate sugar cookies!
Ingredients
- 1 pound powdered sugar (about 3 3/4 cups)
- 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons milk
- 1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons light corn syrup
- 1 teaspoon extract (I use almond because I use almond in my sugar cookies, but other flavors like vanilla, lemon, and peppermint are also delicious)
Instructions
- With a whisk, combine sugar and milk until smooth (no lumps!) Then stir in corn syrup and extract.
- You will use this same recipe for both glazing and piping. Thickened, you can pipe outlines, and as you thin it, you can use it for “flooding” cookies. Make sure to let them dry overnight to fully harden for stacking.
- Prep Time: 5 minutes
- Drying Time: 6-8 hours
Questions & Reviews
Kristie- yes you can store it in the fridge and it will stay good for several days. You'll probably want to let it sit at room temp though before using it.
Hi Sara,
Was just wondering if I could make this icing in advance and leave it in the fridge overnight?
Thanks 🙂
Thanks Sara, I will try it out 🙂
Kristie, I've never used Golden Syrup in this (I'm assuming you're outside of the US?) but I think it would be just fine. I think the corn syrup is mostly for the glossy texture and sheen and golden syrup should do the same thing. Let me know how it goes!
Hi Sara,
Love love love your cookies, they are gorgeous!
Just wondering if I could substitue the light corn syrup with golden syrup instead, thanks 🙂
Simply superb! The recipes..the style..the works of art and the blog layout. Love it! No doubt an inspiration to the sugar passionate people.
Thanks for sharing your recipe. Great pictures. Drooling, drooling, drooling.
rollingindough- (love your screen name by the way, lol) I have no idea what the shelf life of the icing is because I’ve never kept any for future use. I usually just toss it when I’m done. I would imagine that it wouldn’t work well because it hardens over time. It even hardens and becomes thicker from the time I start my cookies to the time I finish, so if you were to save some you would probably need to add more liquid when you were ready to use it again. If you try it out you’ll have to let us know how it goes!
I love your icing recipe and have made it numerous times. What is the shelf life of your icing? How do you store it for future use?
Valentine’s Day Massacre, haha.
One of the most common problems people run into is just having it bleed everywhere and make a goopy mess. The thing that can be tricky is that the consistency of the icing makes it so it spreads a lot, but it spreads slowly. So people sometimes put on way too much and are surprised a minute later when the stuff is everywhere. If you want to make sure they don’t run over the cookie, pipe and edge first. Then put on only a SMALL amount and spread it on really thin(I like to use baby spoons, they work well for me). Once it’s completely covering the cookie, then you can add some more (tiny bit at a time)to make it thicker. Just start small!
Once you get into a groove, you’ll be able to tell just by sight and feel how much you need to make it work. Hope you give it another try!
We will be giving this another try. Because our cookies where for a Valentine’s Day Massacre theme the “bleeding” worked well.
I’ve seen other pictures of cookies made with your glaze that where as great as yours. Is the spoon the best way to apply the glaze? I’m thinking my husband may just be sloppy and heavy handed with the glaze.
If you had a piped edge and the frosting flowed over, it may just be an issue of too much icing! You only need a little bit because it spreads so much. I give it a really thin layer and then add more if I need it.
We decorated some heart cookies with this glaze last night. Even with a piped edge the glaze flowed all over. Next time we will be decreasing the milk and corn syrup to just 1/4 cup each to thicken it up a little.
Angela-
I usually just leave them out on the counter, only because I’d have to round up a lot of containers to put them in since they have to stay in a single layer! I’ve done it both ways and I really don’t think it makes a difference.
When you are letting the glaze set over night do just leave the cookies out on the counter or cover them or put them in an air tight container?
these are beautiful, well done!
Thank you so much for sharing! This looks BEAUTIFUL, and if it’s easier than royal icing (argghh!) I’m totally in!
just had to let you know that i used this frosting recipe and LOVED making these cookies. i copied your snowflake on the circle idea, thought that was SO cute. here’s a blog post of my own with some pics of how my cookies turned out. http://shelbych.blogspot.com/2008/12/cookies-catching-up.html Thanks so much!!!
hey sara …. i made a batch of ur sugar cookies n decorated em with glace icing as seen in ur tutorial… thank u ever so much for this tutorial n the icing recipe…. this is gonna b by go to recipe forever. thank u so much.. n yeah i froze half of my batch.. very ambitious i knw…its been 5 days n yaay they do freeze well n keep well in da freezer. the icing gets a bit hard but the cookie overall stays well wen frozen!!! so u there u go u cn stack em in ur freezer n ve em wenever.. thank u so much !!!
p.s: wil let u knw after 5 more days how the cookies r doin in the freezer . jus in case:)
Thank you for writing this tutorial. I used your recipe and tips while icing my Christmas cookies, and I was incredibly happy with the way they turned out! I posted some photos of them on my blog, if you’d like to see them.
Thanks again!
Sarah, I really don’t know- I’ve never tried freezing them before. If you give it a shot, come back and let us know!
hey sara amazin cookies… i cant stop looking at ur pictures… n now these ve tempted me to make some myself n get all artsy… i ve a question for u… do these cookies freeze well after all the glazin n decorating??? i wanna make a big batch n use ur glace recipe to glaze em n freeze em n take em out wenever needed!!!! pls say u ve done so before!!!!:)
So, I just did these for the second time, and if you’re NOT artistic (like me)doing the dip method (dip and drip) with some festive sprinkles on top makes them look perfect. You can not screw them up!
My daughter is giving sugar cookies to her boyfriend this year so thanks for the glazing tips and recipe:D
The icing is so pretty! I am terrible at using royal icing to flood the top of cookies. I’m so glad I saw this before I made my sugar cookies this year.
I love these cookies glazed like that! I’ll have to try my hand at your tutorial someday. 🙂
Decorating cookies is so much fun! Love yours!
Decorating cookies is so much fun! Love yours!
I tried this recipe and it was fabulous! They’re perfect for my gingerbread and sugar cookies. Thanks for posting it 🙂
I tried these over the weekend and they turned out fantastic! I love how the icing dries so you don’t have to worry about frosting getting everywhere. I used regular food coloring but they were the McCormick Neon colors and I got a really great bright apple green out of that. Thanks for sharing!