Chocolate Sugar Cookies For Easter 2025

 

Speckled Bunnies Sugar Cookies

I can't let Easter go by without making and decorating sugar cookies!  I use a basic recipe from Martha Stewart that I've had for a long time. Here it is:

3 cups flour

3/4 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 sticks butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla extract

Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. Beat butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla. Add flour mixture, beat until combined.

To make chocolate sugar cookies, replaced 1/3 cup flour with 1/3 cup cocoa powder. 

I've been making these sugar cookies for many years and for all occasions. I've never tried any other sugar cookie recipe!  Years ago I used to spend an entire day decorating cookies, using different cutters, making many bags of royal icing in separate outline and flood consistencies, and in different colors. Then I learned to use just one consistency for both outlining and flooding and got away from intricate decorations.  I want to keep up the tradition, but I just don't want to spend as much time on the project.

This year I decided to make all chocolate sugar cookies, just to mix things up a bit.  I got out a few cookie cutters, but I ended up using only one, the smaller-sized rabbit head cutter I have. It was hard on this day (it's been a cold Spring!) to get the icing soft enough to roll. I ended up rolling it in small amounts and kneading it with my hands til it was soft enough. This actually made the bottom of the cookies stronger and less prone to cracking or having gaps, which happens to my cookies quite often. Usually I place the cookies in the freezer for 10 minutes to help them keep their shape, but today I judged the dough to still be firm enough after rolling and cutting to allow me to skip this step. Sure enough, the bunnies kept their shape just fine. However, I forgot to account for the fact that they weren't going into the oven from the freezer, and I baked them a couple of minutes too long. I baked them for 11 minutes, and the cookies weren't as soft as I usually like, but a bit crunchier. Or, maybe it was the chocolate dough, who knows. But, I think it was the temperature of the cookies.

When I went to make the royal icing for decorating, I saw the meringue powder had gone bad. This has never happened before! This pot of meringue powder probably got pushed to the back of the pantry, and in the meantime I must have bought and used up another pot (or 2). So, this pot was really old, likely several years old, probably from before the pandemic. It had solidified and no doubt would have made us sick, so into the trash it went.

Normally I'd have popped out to Walmart to get a fresh container of meringue powder, but luckily before leaving the house I checked availability online. What a shock when I saw the price! The humble container of meringue powder, which would usually cost less than $5, was now between $10-11! Walmart didn't even have it available, and the price was even higher on Amazon. I'm sure whoever's jacked up the price will name pandemic disruptions, the egg shortage, tariffs, inflation... whatever. I'm not paying that for meringue powder! 

But when a door closes, a window opens. I searched a bit online and found this recipe on a blog called Live Well Bake Often.  I even had corn syrup in the pantry, so I decided to try it. Here is the recipe:

4 cups (480 g) powdered sugar

5-6 tablespoons milk

4 teaspoons light corn syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Whisk all the ingredients together with 5 tablespoons milk, until all lumps are gone. Mixture will be very thick. Mix in 1 additional teaspoon at a time until icing has thinned to desired consistency.  Add food coloring if desired.

I ended up using 6 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon of milk, and got a consistency I thought would work well for both outlining and flooding. When dropping icing off the whisk it incorporated back into the bowl in about 4-5 seconds. 

I enjoyed not having to smell meringue powder coming off the mixer, a smell I can't stand!

For the color I used Americolor sky blue, and unfortunately I dropped too much coloring into the mixture. Oh well, it would have to do...

And it did do, and very well too!  The icing was completely pipeable, just a bit harder to squeeze out of the piping bag than royal icing, but I was able to work it. Eventually I switched from a Wilton #2 to a Wilton #3 round tip and that made it much easier. I actually really liked working with this icing, it held its shape super well for outlining, was easy to move around inside the outline, easy to fix the little mistakes while still wet.  

I wasn't enamored of the blue hue I'd achieved and the chocolate cookie made it look even darker. So I decided to try making a speckled robin-egg look.  I made a slurry with cocoa powder and vanilla and flicked it onto the cookies with a food-safe paintbrush.  This came out really cute, and I couldn't decide if I liked plain bunnies or speckled bunnies better.  I consulted Bubby, who liked plain, while I leaned towards speckled.  So, I made some of each.

The icing recipe says to let the decorated cookies dry for 24 hours before you stack them. I let them air dry all afternoon and before going to bed I placed them inside several airtight containers in single rows. In the morning the icing was set! Although if you pushed with your finger you could dent the icing, they were certainly stackable.

The taste of the cookies was good! In contrast to royal icing, this icing didn't dry as crunchy, and it tasted sweeter, maybe because of the corn syrup.  Decorated cookies are always going to have some trade-off with the icing, but in these belt-tightening times it's great to be able to decorate cookies without springing for expensive meringue powder. 

I took some of the cookies to my watercolor class, where everybody liked how they looked and everybody took one to try. I dropped another batch off at a friend's house.  I hope my Easter bunny cookies spread some joy and made my friends' day a little hoppier!