Simple Chinese Lantern Cookies

February 6, 2013 | 81 Comments »

One of the drawbacks of living in a tiny west Texas town is that my exposure to other cultures is sometimes limited to what I read on the Internet.  I’ve always wanted to experience a traditional Chinese New Year celebration, but until that becomes a possibility I have to settle for cookies.  With a little help from my amazing friend Ken, author of Hungry Rabbit, I came up with a pretty good assortment.  My favorite are these simple Chinese lantern cookies.

Chinese Lantern Cookies

There are many cutters that would work well for this project, but I decided on a couple of Christmas ornaments and a snowman.  If you don’t own fancy ornament cutters, I really like this four-ornament set from Fancy Flours or this six-ornament set available via Amazon.com

IMG_6303

To make these cookies you will need:

  • Red piping and 20-second icing
  • Gold piping and 20-second icing
  • Jade piping icing {optional}

To reduce mixing, you could always cut out the red and jade piping icing and use yellow for all of the detail work.

Begin by using red 20-second icing to create a large circle/oval on the largest portion of the cookie.  Don’t worry if it’s not perfect…I read somewhere that Chinese lanterns are traditionally oval shaped.  I don’t know if that’s necessarily true but since it cut a little stress on my end I stuck with that.

Chinese Lantern Cookies 1

Let the base dry, pipe on lantern details, and fill in the gold areas with 20-second icing.

Chinese Lantern Cookies 2

Finish up by using piping icing to add the final details.  I used a #1.5 tip.

Chinese Lantern Cookies 3These cookies look perfect mixed with other fun designs.  I used Montreal Confection’s wet-on-wet design for the fan cookie.  You can view her how-to video here.

Simple Chinese New Year CookiesIf you like this set, be sure to check out these links:

Have you ever celebrated Chinese New Year?  Tell me about it.

Creative Use of Cutters, Sweet Sugar Belle, Tutorials
81 Comments »