How to Make and Ice Shepherd's Hook Sugar Cookies

Charming folklore suggests that the popular holiday candy cane is a Christian symbol in many ways, one being that the sweet treat was bent into the shape of a shepherd’s hook. Today we have a step by step decorating tutorial for beautiful Shepherd’s Hook Sugar Cookies for you.

How to Decorate Shepherd’s Hook Sugar Cookies

Supplies:

1 batch of sugar cookie dough, cut into candy cane/shepherd’s hook shapes and baked*
1 batch of royal icing (Here is a Royal Icing Recipe)
red gel food coloring
small bowl
toothpicks
2 piping bags fitted with #2 round tip
tiny white sprinkles – I used little round but crystals would be pretty too

*If you don’t have a favorite cookie recipe, try our Christmas Sugar Cookies or see our Easy Sugar Cookies Recipe.

Instructions:

Begin by dividing your royal icing. Half will remain white and half will be colored red. When coloring the royal icing, use a little bit of gel coloring on a toothpick and stir until the gel is completely mixed in. Add food coloring a little to a time until desired color is achieved.

Fill your piping bag with white royal icing.

Carefully pipe a fine lines onto the cookie, creating the stripes. Line all of the cookies before continuing to the next step.

In a small bowl, mix 1 cup of white royal icing with water to create the “flooding” icing. Our Royal Icing Recipe and Instructions explain more about this.

Carefully “flood” each of the white stripes with white icing, keeping it within the outline you created.

While the icing is wet, sprinkle with the white sprinkles.

Next, fill a piping bag with red icing and pipe the lines for the red stripes onto the cookies.

In a small bowl, mix 1 cup of red royal icing with water to create the “flooding” icing for the red stripes. Carefully flood the red areas as you did the white. Let the icing dry completely on all cookies before the final step of adding small swirl details to the red stripes.