World Cup Sugar Cookies

By the time this is posted, one team has already been eliminated from the tournament. 

I blame my poor time management on my husband (of course) who told me that the first game of the semifinals was on Wednesday, not Tuesday. 

(Let's not focus on the fact that there are plenty of other, more credible, sources of World Cup scheduling information that are easy to come by.)

Regardless, I have been excited to make these cookies since the World Cup started. We are avid soccer football fans in this household, so we have watched just about every weekend game, and some of the weekday games. 

While our team (zie Germans) didn't get very far this year, we have enjoyed watching some old and new favorites duke it out on the pitch. It's also been fun for me to sit back and relentlessly mock the players who seem to get hurt so easily (<cough>Neymar). 

But I better not waste any more time or else another team will have been eliminated by the time I get around to showing you how I made these fun World Cup sugar cookies. 

Supplies and Recipes

For these cookies, you will need:

• Cookies cut into circles, jerseys/shirts, and a speech bubble.
• Royal icing in black (both piping and flood), white, red, blue (light and dark), and yellow
• A print out image of a soccer ball approximately the same size as your cookie
• Plain white tissue paper
• Food marker
• Piping bags or zip-top bags
• Toothpick or scribe tool

How to Make Them

Your favorite team may already be eliminated, but there is still time left to make these fun World Cup sugar cookies! If you are a football (soccer, for those of us here in the States) fan, these cookies may come in handy just about any time of year, they don't have to just be for the World Cup.

Oddly enough, the soccer balls were the hardest of the cookies to make. Something about the combination of pentagons and hexagons makes it really hard to draw freehand. 

Fortunately, I have a trick to getting the perfectly patterned soccer ball: tracing!

You can see in the video that I use a piece of tissue paper to trace over the image with a food marker. Then I trace the tracing (follow me?) onto the cookie through the tissue. 

I have better pictures to demonstrate the technique here. 

Other than the soccer balls, the rest of the cookies were pretty straightforward. The jerseys can be as simple or as detailed as you'd like. You can see I added some additional details to the emblems, but that certainly isn't necessary. 

So, who do you think is going to win the whole thing? I don't really want to jinx anything, but I think it will be one of these four teams.