An Easy Way to Perfectly Align Cookie Stencils Every Time

In today’s post, you’ll learn how to  perfectly align stencils on cookies.

Perfectly stenciled cookies. Every. Single. Time.  It’s so much easier – and quicker – than you think.  When you have an opaque stencil, you can’t see through it well enough to center it or align it on your cookie exactly where you’d like.  But there’s an easy – and rather fun – way to get it perfect.

I make my own stencils now, but before I learned how, I accumulated quite a few commercial mesh stencils.  They were awesome…very detailed.   However, I couldn’t see through them well enough to see exactly where they fit on the cookie.  I guessed rather well, so all was not lost.  But I wanted better.  I learned how to do better and you can too!

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Here is the step by step tutorial for this easy and fun project.

Here’s What You’ll Need

Begin with a prepared cookie.

You’ll need a baked and flooded cookie which has dried overnight.  An excellent recipe for the cookies and for the royal icing is available in my FREE Resource Library.  You can get the password for the library by filling out the form at the bottom of this post.

The cookie needs to have dried overnight so that the icing is hard enough to withstand the pressure of pressing more royal icing through the mesh stencil. That’s not a lot of pressure, but it is enough to cave in soft flooding.

Whip up a batch of royal icing 

And color it to suit your project.  You don’t even have to bag it if you don’t want to.  Spread it on with a spatula straight from the bowl!

Assemble your clipboard for the cookie stencil

Grab a clipboard.  Clip on the small square of shelf liner.  This serves to hold the cookie in place while you apply the stenciled icing.  It has just enough grip to hold it in place, but also to release it easily and not damage the cookie.

Next attach the clear page protector with a paper clamp on one side only.  Once stenciled, this serves as an excellent template so you can see exactly where the cookie and stencil line up.

Next, attach your stencil.

RELATED READING:  DIY Cookie Stencils

Stencil the page protector

Yes, it sounds silly.  But you’ll see how cool it really is when you see the video below!  This will serve as your template or guideline.  Since the stencil won’t move at all (it’s clipped down in place), it will be in the exact same spot each and every time you stencil a cookie.  And the clear page protector shows you that spot.

Now stencil the cookie

Move the page protector out of the way, but leave it clipped in place.  Place the cookie on the clipboard.  Lay the page protector over the cookie for an excellent visual of where the stenciled icing will end up.  Adjust your cookie as you like.  In my example, I moved the cookie up just a bit to allow room for the second stencil to fit.  Actually, I left enough room to also write in the birthday boy’s name, but somehow time got away from me and that never happened.  I don’t think anyone even noticed, so that’ll be our little secret, ok?

Now that the cookie’s in place, move the page protector out of the way again and stencil that cookie!

A video is worth a thousand words.

So here you go…

And there you have it…perfectly stenciled cookies!

RELATED READING:  Create your own knockout design

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