Watercolor Painted Unicorn Sugar Cookies Tutorial

Welcome to day two of Unicorn Week! Today it's all about another sweet treat: unicorn sugar cookies.

My 7 year old daughter marches to the beat of her own drum. When she was three she marched up to Santa and asked for a zombie costume for Christmas. (How did she even know what zombies were???) I adore my darling child and all of her quirks, but I have to admit that I am delighted that some of her friends still like things like unicorns. Because even though I'm a 40 year old woman now, I'm still an eight year old girl-at-heart who LOVES unicorns.

So when my daughter's friend asked for a unicorn themed birthday party, I was there for her. Unicorn cupcakes [1], unicorn cookies, unicorn poop candy buttons... I went full-on-magical-unsolocited-party-gal on them.

I used my favorite sugar cookie recipe [2] to bake the cookie shapes. This is the first time I've used this particular unicorn shaped cookie cutter [3], and though I loved the results, I have to say that using the cutter was kind of a pain in the ass. My grandmother, a professional cake decorator and cookie-baker-extraoridinaire, hated cookie cutters like these with fragile, long, skinny parts. Too much opportunity for breakage. The legs, the horn, the tail--so fragile! I didn't have much trouble once they were baked, but the horn and hooves really wanted to get stuck in the cutter and break off while I was cutting out the dough. Dip the cutter in flour before every cut to help head off these difficulties. And use the rolling-out technique I show here, too.

Once the cookies were baked and cooled, I covered them in a base coat of flooded royal icing [4]. I let the icing dry for about an hour, and then added the piped-on mane and tail with a small star icing tip [5] and some stiff, piping-consistency icing. I let the cookies dry overnight before adding painted embellishments.

The next day, after the royal icing was completely dry, I painted the color shading on to the body, mane, and tail of the unicorn cookies. I made something of a watercolor paint using gel food coloring and Everclear alcohol (it evaporates so quickly because of the high alcohol content, so it's ideal for this purpose). Using my edible watercolor paints, I added shading to the unicorn body, used the moist icing to adhere star sprinkles [6] to the unicorn's haunches, and added color the the mane and tail.

The hooves and horn were painted on with gold airbrush color [7]. I love painting with colors designed for airbrushing; they're already perfectly thinned and ready for painting.

Keep coming back for more unicorn themed tutorials all week! And be sure to follow my Unicorn Pinterest board [8] to keep up with all the fabulous unicorn ideas I find around the web.

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