Cookie Christmas lights: How to make decorations you can eat

IF YOU want to impress your mother-in-law this Christmas here’s how to do it. These cookie lights take decorations to the next level.

ONE of Christmas’s greatest joys is its inseparable connection to food.

As well as being the season for glorious, shared feasts, edible delights seem to spring up everywhere: Candy canes hung from the tree, cookies left out for Santa, and maybe a Choc Chip Cookie Cup filled with Baileys on Christmas Eve.

The only thing not festooned with food has been the string of blinking Christmas lights. But that changes this year.

Cookie Christmas lights and cookie lanterns will amaze your guests, but they’re actually really easy to make. Picture: Tristan Lutze

With some sugar, butter, flour and a few boiled lollies, you can turn your strings of fairy lights into delicious, magical treats.

Admire the beautiful, coloured shapes blinking around the tree or across a wall, then invite your guests to take a bite.

Or use the same recipe to create beautiful, edible candle-filled lanterns. Cast a festive glow over the dining table, then eat the candle holders for dessert.

Merry, delicious Christmas!

CHRISTMAS LIGHT COOKIES RECIPE

(You can also watch this in the video above)

The finished product. Beautiful and delicious. Picture: Tristan Lutze

Ingredients:

135g unsalted butter, room temperature

¾ cup icing sugar

1 egg

1 ½ tsp vanilla extract

2 cups plain flour

2 egg whites

White sugar for sprinkling

Clear boiled lollies or lollipops

String

Assorted cookie cutters, large and small (available from any cake decorating shop)

Royal Icing (for candle lanterns):

1 egg white

1 ½ cup icing sugar

Method:

Preheat oven to 170 degrees C.

Using a hand beater or stand mixer, beat the icing sugar and butter together until light and creamy, using a plastic spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl before beating again.

Add egg and vanilla extract and beat again until combined.

Add flour and use a knife to combine until the dough just starts coming together (you want to move or mix the dough as little as possible at this point).

Empty bowl onto a couple of large sheets of baking paper, use paper to bring dough together into a ball, and flatten with a floured rolling pin until ½ cm thick.

Cut cookies into large shapes- circles, squares, stars, triangles- ensuring they are big enough to have smaller shapes cut out inside them leaving at least 8mm of dough between cuts.

Carefully transfer cookie shapes to a baking tray lined with baking paper, then use small cookie cutters to cut a shape from the centre of the cookie. The remaining dough can be gently re-rolled with a floured rolling pin and used to make more cookies.

Beat the two egg whites with a fork. Use a pastry brush to ‘paint’ each cookie with egg, then sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 5 minutes, or until cookies are just set but not brown. While cookies are still warm, use a skewer or toothpick to make a small hole where you will later thread the string.

Remove boiled lollies/lollipops from their packets and group into individual colours. Gather each colour in separate plastic or ziplock bags, then wrap again in a second bag. Smash lollies with a rolling pin until broken into small pieces and crumbs.

Making the coloured lights is as simple as melting broken up lollies inside the cookie holes. Picture: Tristan Lutze

Fill the shapes inside the cookies with one colour of broken lollies, piling them slightly higher than the cookie, but taking care not to lay lolly crumbs over the cookies.

Return cookies to the oven for approximately 12 minutes, or until cookies are brown and lollies have melted.

Remove tray from oven and let stand until cool.

Thread string through the small hole in the cookie (you may need to gently increase the size of the hole with a toothpick), then tie over one of the globes on a string of fairy lights. Repeat, evenly spaced, until all your cookies are strung.

TO MAKE A COOKIE CANDLE LANTERN:

Tristan’s cookie candle lantern. Picture: Tristan Lutze

Follow the recipe above, but use a square cookie cutter to cut the dough and skip making the small hole for string.

When the square cookies have been baked and cooled, make a royal icing by whipping one egg white with 1½ cups pure icing sugar until smooth and shiny.

Carefully spread the icing onto the two ‘vertical’ sides of two of the four cookie squares, then glue them all together into a cube. Sit the lantern on a sheet of baking paper until icing has hardened. Set it on the table with an unscented tealight candle inside.

Enjoy the festive lights, then invite your guests to eat them!

Note: in the warm Australian summer, the lolly centres of these cookies will begin to melt after two or three days.

Tristan Lutze is a Sydney-based food writer and photographer. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram.