Color Block Your Sweets: Dip Dye Cookies

Nanette Wong · Nov 29, 2012

Everyone loves the classic sugar cookie and madeleine. But sometimes, it’s just so… vanilla. To add a little oomph to one of our favorite classic cookies, we added a fun burst of color. The result? A dip dye cookie and madeleine collection! Quite a mouthful isn’t it? Pun intended ;) This would be great change of pace for your 12 days of Christmas cookies collection as well.

We used store bought cookies, but you can also bake your own with pre-made dough or from scratch.

Ingredients:

– sugar cookies and madeleines

– 3 cups confectioner’s sugar

– 3 tsp light corn syrup

– 4 tb milk

– food coloring

First, we’re going to start off by making our custom colored icing.

In a large bowl, mix together the milk and the confectioner’s sugar. It’s going to be lumpy, but don’t worry. When it gets too lumpy to mix, slowly add in the corn syrup and keep mixing. You can see that it starts to smooth out and become glassy (bottom right picture). If it still seems too lumpy for your taste, add just a little more corn syrup. If you think it’s too think, add a little bit of milk. Be careful though, if it’s too thin, it’ll be hard for the icing to dry.

The finished icing.

Now, for the ombre madeleines and cookies! Separate your icing into three bowls (but don’t use all of it if you want to make different solid colored cookies later). In the first bowl, add a very small drop of gel food coloring. The coloring is very potent, so we used a toothpick to drop some coloring in. For each bowl, add the same amount plus a little bit more of the coloring from the previous bowl to create the gradient effect.

Then, dip your cookies in the “dye”! It’s so simple. If you’re afraid of getting icing everywhere, work on parchment paper or wax paper to ensure easy cleanup.

After making our ombre cookies, we started making solid colored icing. We mixed different gel colors with different batches of icing to create a multitude of colors. Then, dipped our cookies!