HOW TO FROST COOKIES - WITHOUT ROYAL ICING

I see a lot of tutorials on making royal icing cookies, but that's just too much work!  Who has time to make the icing and then pipe it around on a cookie and fill it in later?  Here's my "cheater's" way to do it and it doesn't involve making royal icing or a piping tool - just some powdered sugar and a butter knife!  This is the way my mom always decorates her sugar cookies for Christmas and they're always beautiful.  What would we do without our mothers and their wise ways?

Also, I see that I managed to use a picture that showed the frosting globbed on the side of the cookie.  This is a carefully constructed illustration to show you that everyone makes mistakes and your cookies don't have to be perfect (or, maybe it was really late at night and I was trying to take pictures and frost cookies and I was delirious).

The frosting will have a nice, firm top on it once it's dried, so you don't have to worry about being overly careful with them if you're freezing or gifting the cookies.

time: 5 min. to make frosting
makes: 12-24 cookies
YOU WILL NEED:

1 cup powdered sugar
1/4 tsp. almond flavoring
1-2 tsp. milk or water
food coloring
12-24 Cookies to frost

In a bowl, mix all the ingredients until it has the consistency of thick soup.  Add more milk or more powdered sugar as needed.  You can experiment with the ratios to get the consistency that you like. 

Next, scoop some frosting up with a butter knife and spread it onto your cookie.  You can stop here if you'd like, or you can make designs into the frosting, too.

Just drizzle a different color of frosting onto the cookie and swipe through the design with a toothpick to create marbled designs.

Here is a sort of poinsettia design.  You can also do stripes, scribbles, or waves.  Sometimes the frosting melts off the sides a bit of you put too much on, but it adds character, right?

And here are some of the finished products!