Notebook Paper Sugar Cookies for Back to School

One week and counting until Back To School around here. What softens the blow for little hearts thinking about school with a little dread, a little worry, and a little excitement all mixed together? Notebook Paper Sugar Cookies.

I love sugar cookies, but I’m far from an expert cookie decorator. These ones are pretty simple to put together, even for me who was trying this fancy icing flooding for the first time. They’re not perfect, but I think they’re perfectly imperfect…and they’re delicious and almost too cute to eat, almost. 😉

Start with making your favourite sugar cookies…or buying a prepared dough and just rolling them out, or using a cookie dough mix. Your choice, whatever suits. Cut them into squares, or rectangles -think paper sheet shape. Bake them and let them cool.

Now for the tricky bit. You’re going to make icing and flood your cookies so you get a nice, smooth, hard layer of icing. I used a recipe that called for a cup of icing sugar and 2 tablespoons of milk combined. I used this as a starting place.

If I were doing this again, I might use a different recipe for the icing, I think one with egg whites or meringue powder instead of milk would have hardened up even more and more quickly too.

My friend who makes beautiful cookies all the time advised that the first batch of icing should have the consistency of toothpaste. This thicker icing is piped around the edge of the cookie first. Next you add some more milk to the icing until it’s runnier, she said it should disappear when dripped back into the bowl from a spoon within a second or two. I used a ziplock bag with the corner snipped off for an easy icing bag. I made small amounts of icing and made more as I needed it. The cookies didn’t come out perfectly, but I’m pretty happy with them as a first attempt at this method, and here to tell you to be brave and try it, and give yourself permission to not be perfect on your first attempt.

Once they’re iced with the white icing, leave the cookies out overnight for the icing to harden. I left mine two days. You want the icing to be hard enough to write on with the markers.

I used edible markers to make the lines of the paper, you can find them at the craft store. Use a ruler to make your lines straight and don’t press too hard.

I planned to use some black gel icing to write on the cookies “ACB”, or my kid’s names. But, I loved how they looked plain. I might add this detail for our Back To School Dinner -see last years here. Or, I might let my girls write on them themselves at the dinner.