Fireworks Celebration Cookies

Today I’m sharing with you my simple method for making and decorating cookies like colorful fireworks. You can use flower and star cookie cutters, and choose from my 2 favorite cookie icings below. (I include my royal icing recipe in the printable recipe card.) Finish them off with some shimmery sprinkles and get ready for everyone to ooh and ahh when you serve these fireworks celebration cookies—they’re sure to spark excitement! For today’s firework cookies, I use my classic sugar cookies recipe. No surprise there, because it’s one of the most popular recipes on my website! I added a little lemon extract and zest for flavor, but that’s completely optional. If you want to give your fireworks a dark-sky background, you can take this decorating inspiration and use it on my chocolate sugar cookies.

All the Details!

Texture: Rolling the dough out to 1/4-inch thickness makes for extra soft and thick sugar cookie centers. The edges are nice and crisp, and the royal icing on top adds a textural contrast as well. Flavor: Sweet, vanilla- and lemon-hinted, and irresistibly buttery, who knew simple sugar cookies could explode with so much flavor!? Ease: The dough comes together easily, but if you want the cookies to look like the photos here, you’ll need a few decorating tools. See the full list of Recommended Tools below. Time: I recommend setting aside an afternoon for making and decorating these fireworks celebration cookies. It’s typically 4 hours from start to finish, depending on the level of decorating detail you want. The cookies stay fresh and soft for days, so this is a great make-ahead dessert!

Overview: How to Make Party-Perfect Fireworks Celebration Cookies

The Trick Is the Order of Steps

Here’s another trick! Roll out the cookie dough directly on silicone baking mats or parchment paper sheets so you can easily transfer it to the refrigerator. Pick the whole thing up, set it on a baking sheet, and place it in the refrigerator. If you don’t have enough room for 2 baking sheets in your refrigerator, you can stack the pieces of rolled-out dough on top of each other (with parchment or baking mat in between). Let me explain why I do this. Just like when you’re making, say, chocolate chip cookies, to prevent them from over-spreading, the cookie dough must chill in the refrigerator. For today’s fireworks celebration cookies, roll out the dough right after you mix it up, then chill the rolled-out dough. (Because at this point the dough is too soft to cut into shapes.) Don’t chill the cookie dough and then try to roll it out because it will be too stiff. I divide the dough in half before rolling it out, because smaller sections of dough are simply more manageable.

Choose Your Icing

I use Wilton icing tip #2 to pipe the fireworks’ lines on the cooled cookies. If you want to add sprinkles like the pictured cookies, I piped every other line, dipped the cookie (with wet icing) into sparkling sugar sprinkles, and then piped the rest of the lines. That probably made no sense, so look at this picture to get a better idea: Divide the batch of icing up into a few bowls, and use gel food coloring to tint the icing different colors such as red, dark blue, light blue, purple, pink, etc. You can also add little star sprinkles to the fireworks cookies; I used the stars from this sprinkle mix. Pipe a little dot of icing, then adhere the star sprinkle to it. For the pictured plain star-shaped cookies, you can just pipe a border around them and flood the center with icing. Then feel free to add sprinkles for extra flair. Stack, wrap, gift, and/or store: Once the icing has set, you can stack, wrap, gift, and/or store these festive cookies. If you need more cookie inspiration, today’s cookies join 25+ others on my Summer Cookie Recipes collection page. Or for more summer holiday inspiration, see my list of 4th of July desserts. 🙂