Christmas Baking

Merry Christmas to everyone! This Christmas holidays, my family and I went back to Spain to visit our family just like we do each year. We had lots of fun and we spent most of our time with our grandparents and cousins since we had two new baby cousins that we hadn't met yet. For Christmas, we made sugar cookies with Christmas shapes and we decorated them with royal icing of different colours. We all worked together on them; as you will see on the pictures, my grandma, dad, sister, and even cousins helped us and we had a lot of fun! :)

This is the sugar cookie recipe that I used:

Vanilla-Almond Sugar Cookies(taken from Bake at 350)

3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
 2 sticks butter, cold
 1 egg
 3/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/2 tsp pure almond extract
(you can use any extract that you have or like since it is what gives the cookies its own taste)

Preheat oven to 350.

Combine the flour and baking powder, set aside. Cream the sugar and butter. Add the egg and extracts and mix. Gradually add the flour mixture and beat just until combined, scraping down the bowl, especially the bottom.

The dough will be crumbly, so knead it together with your hands as you scoop it out of the bowl for rolling. 

Roll onto a floured surface and cut into shapes. Place on parchment lined baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes. Let sit a few minutes on the sheet, then transfer to a cooling rack.
This is how the finished product looked(it is kind of messy because I couldn't bring the squeeze bottles in my bags all the way to Spain so we had to use a spoon):

The Icing recipe that I used is from "I am Baker" blog and all you have to do is mix 1 cup of powdered sugar with 1 tablespoon of milk and one tablespoon of corn syrup in a bowl until it gets to the consistency that you need. Usually i'll start with 1 tablespoon of milk and i'll add more later since it is easier to add more milk than to add more sugar.
I hope you like them!