These watermelon cookies are really easy to make and are perfect for the summer. Learn how to make them using royal icing, and you’ll be on your way to refreshing and beautiful watermelon cookies.
I’m obsessed with watermelon cookies.
I love doing other fruit cookies like lemon slice cookies and orange slice cookies, but watermelon cookies are just different.
They require a bit more detail, but not too much to put off a beginner to royal icing decorating, and they’re just so cute.
The best part is you don’t need any special cookie cutters for them.
You can use a circle cookie cutter, or if you don’t have that, you can use the rim of a cup to cut the circles and then a knife to cut them in half.
In this tutorial for watermelon cookies, I’m going to walk you step by step through what you will need, how to make them, and how to decorate these watermelon cookies.
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These watermelon cookies are:
- cute and fun
- great for summer, paired with watermelon popsicles
- delicious without any crumbling
- easy to make for royal icing beginners
Must-Have Baking Tools (seriously)
- Silicone baking mats – I use this brand and my cookies slide right off without burning!
- a cookie scoop – get this one. It makes the perfect rounded cookies every time!
- silicone spatula – try this set. It’s the best way to get the most out of your dough and batters
- rolling pin guides – I use this one. Genius way to roll your dough out evenly!
What You’ll Need to Make Decorated Watermelon Cookies
Making watermelon cookies means you’re going to need some ingredients!
For the sugar cookie dough, you’ll want: granulated sugar, powdered sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla extract, salt, baking powder, and flour.
You’ll also need to make the royal icing, which I do using meringue powder, water, powdered sugar and vanilla extract.
As for the tools and colors you’ll need, I recommend:
- green food coloring – gel food coloring always works better than liquid for icing
- pink food coloring
- edible black food marker – this one is the best
- piping bags – this brand is the best
- a scribe or toothpick – I use this one
- circle cookie cutter
How Do I Store Watermelon Cookies?
Watermelon cookies made with royal icing are super easy to store.
You don’t need to put them in the fridge or freeze them, all you need to do is store them at room temperature in an airtight container for 2-3 weeks.
If you do want to make them ahead of time, you can freeze the actual cookie bases, but once you’ve decorated it with the icing, freezing may cause problems with the royal icing.
Can I Substitute Ingredients in Watermelon Cookies
Everything in these recipes is created due to the science of baking.
You can’t deviate from the recipe and expect the same results.
For some people, this is fine – they know that they like their cookies with a bit less flour or they like to bake them for a shorter amount of time.
If you’re not an experienced baker, don’t substitute anything in these recipes.
If you’re looking for substitutions for dietary reasons, you’d be much better suited looking or a recipe that was geared towards your requirement and then using the watermelon cookie decorating tutorial below.
How to Make Watermelon Cookies
The first thing you need to do before you make the actual watermelon cookies is to make the bases!
These will be the bases we use to decorate on and we want them to be sturdy and flat, so we use a cut-out sugar cookie recipe.
The reason for using a cut-out sugar cookie recipe instead of any sugar cookie recipe is because these types of recipes are especially formulated to keep the cookie together and not spread in the oven.
If the sides of your cookie spread, soon you’re left with a blob of cookies and not necessarily the shape that you put in there.
Follow the recipe exactly, including creaming the butter and sugars first, adding in the flour slowly, and kneading the dough on the counter if you find that it needs a bit of extra work to get mixed together.
Use a circle cookie cutter to cut out shapes once you’ve rolled the dough, and then use a knife to make a clean cut through half of the cookie to make a wedge shape that will be our watermelon slices.
Bake until the sides are just lightly golden.
I prefer my cookies on the softer side, so I do this instead of letting them get brown all the way around.
Cookies harden when they finally cool, and if they look perfectly done in the oven, they’ll bake further and go past done.
How to Make Royal Icing for Watermelon Cookies
The component of the cookies that make it all come together, the royal icing, is important to play around with and get right to make sure you have a smooth finish!
Royal icing can be intimidating to new bakers, as it’s not as easy as buttercream to just slather on, but I guarantee you that it is really actually easy to make and once you practice a few times, you’ll be good to go.
You can also always make it thicker with powdered sugar or thinner with water so you can’t really ruin a batch of it.
Use my royal icing recipe to create the icing for this recipe.
I use 12 second consistency icing for this, whch means that if you drag a knife through the icing, it takes about 12 seconds for the line to disappear.
You can also do two consistencies, a thicker one for the “outline” and a thinner one for the “flood,” but I prefer the look of a single consistency better and it’s way faster to use.
When you’ve got the royal icing how you want it, separate it out into bowls to add the food coloring and then put it in piping bags.
I use tipless piping bags and just cut the end off instead of using different tips, but if you have a thin tip, you can use that too.
Must-Have Decorating Tools
- Piping bags – I use and love these ones
- Gel food coloring – much better than liquid food coloring
- Meringue powder – I use this kind for my royal icing
- Scribe – for awesome detail and clean up
How to Decorate Watermelon Cookies with Royal Icing
I love decorating watermelon cookies with royal icing as it’s super fun and easy, but creates great looking cookies.
The first thing you want to do is create the rind using a green icing.
Outline this on the rounded edge of the cookie and fill it in immediately with green.
Let that dry for about 30 minutes, then do the same with white.
Finally, outline and fill in the pink for the watermelon for the rest of the cookie.
Let this dry fully for a good couple of hours, and then when you are confident that the royal icing is hardened enough to write on top of, use an edible food marker to add little black marks for the seeds.
And that’s it!
How to decorate watermelon cookies with royal icing – the perfect summer treat!
Decorated Watermelon Cookies
These decorated watermelon cookies are as cute as they are tasy, made with royal icing and sugar cookie dough.
Ingredients
- 24 cookies using cut-out sugar cookie dough
- 1 batch of royal icing, separated in the colors you want to decorate
Instructions
- Bake the watermelon cookies using the sugar cut-out cookie recipe
- Make a batch of royal icing using the royal icing recipe
- Separate out the royal icing into green, pink, and white and put into piping bags
- Outline the watermelon slice with a green rind and flood this section in green
- Wait 15 minutes and add a section of white to go in between the green rind and the pink
- Wait 15 minutes and fill in the rest of the cookie with watermelon pink
- Wait 2 to 3 hours and then use an edible marker to add some black dots for the watermelon seeds
- Let dry for 12 hours
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