Cookies are a popular treat for the holidays, they’re fun to make in the kitchen with family, and they even make great gifts! Our Morgan Koziar caught up with local baker, Giovanna Franzetta of Giovanna’s Gourmets to get some tips on how to decorate cookies. While Giovanna wouldn’t share any of her secret recipes, she demonstrated a lot of her techniques that she uses to create her designs. “The key to a good design is good consistency in your icing…and patience, you have to have patience,” says Giovanna. She explains why royal icing is the best icing to work with when decorating cookies.

Giovanna shows us how to make a series of designs – for starters she made cookie sticks. Giovanna showed Morgan how to do what she calls a “wet on wet.” She starts with a blank or “naked” cookie and outlines the edges and fills in the rest with a wider tipped bag, which she calls “flooding.” To create the tree design, Giovanna creates a series of green lines that get smaller as she moves up the cookie, then with a tip, she drags the tool upward dragging the design along with it. She finishes the look with a brown trunk, red ornaments, and of course a star to top the tree!

For the mitten cookies, Giovanna creates the brim of the mitten with green icing, and adds decorative sugar to add some texture. For the design she demonstrates the wet on wet technique again alternating colors of lines as she goes. With the wet on wet technique, Giovanna says you must work quickly, as the icing dries.

To contact Giovanna you can call (814) 404-3779, email her at jean@giovannasgourmets.com or visit giovannasgourmets.com.