Christmas in July Sugar Cookie Celebration

Learn how to make some tropical Santa decorated sugar cookies with this royal icing cookie decorating tutorial!!

brightly colored summer Christmas decorated chocolate sugar cookies

If blogs had Christmas specials...this would be it. It would start with a dark, snowy night that cuts inside to a warm kitchen where a smartly dressed female actor (who is clearly just pretending to be me...because let's be honest, I've never been smartly dressed in my life...) is patiently and sweetly decorating Christmas cookies with her adorably well-behaved children. (More creative license...you can be sure of that. 😂😂)

One of those sweet little angel faces looks up and asks, "Mommy, was our coat closet always full of cookie cutters?"

The clearly-has-it-all-together-mother-impersonators stares off into the middle distance and says, "Let me tell you a story..."

And as the current scene slowly fades into a scene of the past, you find yourself sucked into some ridiculously predictable heartwarming story that you just can't pull yourself away from. (PROBABLY because you're procrastinating again.) That's basically what is happening right now. Because this is my blog. And I'm going to tell you my ridiculously predictable heartwarming story and there is nothing you can do about it! Except... I mean... you could always just scroll to the bottom. Or click away entirely. Okay, you know what? I guess you do have a lot of options. But I'm still going to tell you my story anyway.

When I first started decorating cookies "for real" and not just "for pretend" anymore, I lived in South Korea. It's on the other side of the world from everyone I had ever known. I didn't have a lot of supplies or any kind of real knowledge of the Sugar Arts. I had a handful of food coloring, a Ziploc bag full of cutters and no fear of failure. Mostly because I was alone in a foreign country with my two very small children. And there was nothing to fear except their very real and frequent tantrums resulting in their perceived lack of sugar allowances.

But then I found the cookie decorating COMMUNITY. Callye from Sweet Sugarbelle kept me company at three in the morning. Hani from Haniela's gave me the confidence boost I needed to keep being weird. Meaghan of The Decorated Cookie helped me stop over-complicating evvvvvvvvvvverything. Jill from JillFCS helped me solve design (and real life) problems.

We made things out of sugar. And we connected. And I'm not sure if you caught this part -- I was living in a foreign country -- so I REALLY loved that whole "connecting to other actual people that have thoughts and opinions that don't consist of tantrums and whining" thing.

Callye and I were talking about those opening days/months/years of this new cookie decorating world and feeling a little mournful that the quiet, tight community has been replaced with this crazy, exciting, surprising community we have now. As a community gets bigger, it's natural that it should lose some of the personal nature that it once had. But luckily, we didn't lose our friendships. In fact...we've only added to them.

So to celebrate our virtual walk down memory lane... Callye and I decided to throw together something that has kind of been lost to the cookie decorating community in the last few years and go old school with a COOKIE COLLABORATION!!!

(Basically... a bunch of us got together and went crazy with our Christmas in July ideas! Scroll to the bottom of the post for links to all the amazing friends that joined us!!)

Santa Claus in summer sugar cookie decorating tutorial

How to make tropical Santa decorated sugar cookies:

Step 1.

Make a ton of royal icing transfer sunglasses. Make twice as many as you need. Because you will break some. And also because they are really fun to play with.

To make a royal icing transfer, place a design under a piece of wax paper or parchment paper. "Trace" the design with icing. Let the icing dry completely - at least overnight. To remove the transfer, slide the edge of the paper down over a sharp corner of a counter or table. Cradle the transfer with a thin spatula or knife as the paper peels down and away from it. Check out THIS POST for more help with royal icing transfers.

Step 2.

With medium consistency white icing and a #3 tip, outline and fill the beard portion of the cookie. Let the icing dry for an hour.

Step 3.

Fill in the top portion of the cookie with a medium consistency skin colored icing. Let dry for another 30 minutes.

Step 4.

Pipe a few dots of icing on the back of the sunglasses transfers and attach to the face. Pipe a nose with the skin colored icing. Let dry for 30 minutes.

Step 5.

Pipe one side of the mustache with the white icing. Sit back and think about how weird this looks. Let dry for 15 minutes.

Step 6.

Pipe the other half of the mustache. Add some eyebrows. Switch to a #1.5 tip and pipe swirly lines all over the beard. Give your Santa a charming smile with a black food color marker.

Pattern sheet for fun royal icing transfer sunglasses

Use this sunglasses pattern sheet for your royal icing transfers! Use with a digital projector or right click to copy and paste the image into a word document for printing.

Check out these other AMAZING cookie artists and see what they've come up with!!