Decorating cookies at home is a lot easier than it looks.

However there are a few essential tools that you require in order to produce the best results. Luckily these tools are not expensive and they can easily be found in your local department stores such as Kmart or Target as well as online stores such as Amazon and Ebay.

There are a few items needed but today we will go through the top 3 must-have tools for cookie decorating:

1. Piping bags or bottles

This would be classified as one of the most important tools if you are decorating cookies with royal icing, we use it for piping, flooding and drawing on the details. Personally we prefer the bottles over the bags just because we find them easier to hold and use but you may find the bags to be a better match for your decorating, so whichever one works for you is the one you should get.

We have bought most of our piping bottles from an online store called Karen’s Cookies

2. Decorating Nozzle Tips

These pretty much go hand in hand with the piping bags and bottles, without them it’s going to be a bit difficult to decorate cookies. Typically when you start off you would only need 3 different types of nozzles:

• No. 2 Round decorating tip which we use for all our outline work and majority of the time the details as well.
• No. 12 Round decorating tip which is used for flooding a cookie because it has a much bigger tip and allows the icing to flow out easier.
• No. 1 Round decorating tip is great for piping on very fine details and also for writing because it has a very small tip.

Decorating nozzles can easily be found on Amazon, there is quite a vast variety, but we would say that Wilton typically have the best ones.

3.  Food Coloring

If you are going to be decorating with icing then you will need a range of food dyes to mix all those beautiful colors together so that your cookies will have that burst of color that instantly makes them stand out. Also it helps if you have a lot of detail on the cookie to distinguish what each thing is that you have piped on.

If you don’t want to invest too much money in food colors at the beginning then we would recommend you just get the 3 primary colors; red, blue and yellow and that way you can mix them to make other colors such as green and purple. It would also help if you had black to darken the colors and white to give them a lighter (almost pastel) look.

Again, the best place to purchase food coloring is either Amazon or Karen’s Cookies.

So those are are top 3 essential tools for cookie decorating, if you would like to know what other items are needed then we have a FREE guide to give you when you sign up to our newsletter below.