melted snowman cookies

I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do to decorate our house for L’s recent first birthday party. Well, aside from these super cute snowman cookies. I saw them in Instagram. I saw them all over Pinterest. So these were pretty much all I was planning on when I decided to commit to a theme and send out the invites.

I’ll be sharing more about how we pulled together her recent soirée but wanted to start with these since they’re so easy for how cute they turn out. I used my favorite sugar cookie recipe you can find here.

Icing ingredients

• 1 cup confectioners sugar
• 2 teaspoons milk
• 2 teaspoons light corn syrup
• 1/4 teaspoon almond extract

Decoration ingredients

• A bag of pretzels (I love the Snyder’s of Hanover mini ones, but any you have extra of will do if they aren’t too thick!)
• A bag of M&Ms
• A bag of large marshmallows
• Orange noses (you can specifically order orange candy noses in advance or do what I did and just use a bag of orange jimmies from your local party store)

I made these the night before just because I wanted to ice them, add the decorations and allow time for them to fully set. Going with an icing recipe with a bit of corn syrup in it helped with the setting process as well. You can somewhat stack them for storage but the marshmallows make doing so a bit more challenging.

I didn’t have a cookie cutter that worked for this so I used the top of a plastic cup we had as a Plan B. Worked just fine. Decorating was super easy. I did a layer of the icing first, and then placed the marshmallow firmly on. I tested it out (above) just to think through where the marshmallow head should go.

Next, I added the two M&M buttons and the pretzel arms. The pretzel arms can pretty much put to use all the crumbs of your favorite pretzels or you can strategically break them to figure out the best way to find a pair of arms that will work. Then, all you need to do is add the nose!