How to Make Realistic Autumn Leaf Cookies

Autumn Leaf Cookies

I make cutout cookies year round at my house, just depending on the season, they might be sailboats, Christmas trees, hearts or pumpkins.  I am no pastry chef and my decorating skills are just so-so, but I really wanted to try to use the Wilton Color Mist and see if I could improve upon my Autumn Leaf Cookies.

fall-leaf-cookies

I don’t know about you, but I think the final product turned out great!  The only way I could have been more pleased was if my other colors had turned out as well as the yellow – orange combination.

Step One: Bake the Cookies
I baked my cutout cookies using this family recipe for delicious Nutmeg Sugar Cookies.  I used a variety of small and large leaf cutters.  Don’t forget you will need to let your cookies cool before frosting them. Decorating cookies is best done in steps!

Step Two: Apply Frosting Base
I used my favorite cookie frosting, which is actually any brand of creamy vanilla cake frosting.  I colored it yellow and then thinned it with water, adding a little bit at a time until it would fall back into itself without any peaks or disturbance.  I then dipped each cookie down into the frosting until it was thickly coated with the yellow frosting.Thinned frosting for dipping cookies

Step Three: Spray with Wilton’s Color Mist
I let the frosting on the cookies begin to dry (this is the tricky part), but not TOO dry and sprayed them with Wilton Color Mist in red.  I sprayed them unevenly.  I then let them dry a little longer (tricky again), and ran a toothpick through the frosting to simulate the veins in the leaves.

Wilton Color Mist SprayFall Leaf Cookies drying on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper
Step Four: Let the cookies dry some more…
I let the cookies dry on a parchment paper – lined cookie sheet until they were completely dry and then displayed them in a wicker cornucopia with candy acorns for a lovely Thanksgiving treat.

Cornucopia of Autumn Leaves and AcornsFall Leaf Cookies

Hopefully next year I can vary the color of my leaves a little more. You can try different colors: Wilton Color Mist comes in Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Yellow, Orange, Black, Silver, Gold, and Pearl.

Please let me know in the comments below if you’ve ever used Wilton Color Mist – share a picture or two, if you can!


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34 Comments

    1. Thank you Peggy! The acorns are Hershey Kisses, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips and mini vanilla wafers. Use a little melted chocolate (I use some of the chocolate chips) to “glue” all the pieces together. I have to hide them to make sure there are some left for the holiday after I finish making them!

  1. I’ve never seen this product before, Chloe…that looks interesting. With teen bakers (and their friends) in the house, it might be fun to try something different this holiday! 🙂

  2. Hello Chloe,

    Dropping in from the Sunday Blog Hop. Thank you so much for linking up this post.

    Your cookies look so fantastic and real! I bet they taste even better than they look too!

    Thanks again for sharing, hope to see you link up again next Sunday 🙂

  3. Those are cute! I was expecting you to have an air brush, I am glad you did it with things I can actually buy easily (and not have to make an investment in!)

  4. These are beautiful…and so easy to decorate…I think you win first place for best looking autumn leaf cookies with least effort

  5. Look at you go, beautiful work Chloe! I’ve used Wilton’s Mist before and it is lots more convenient than dragging out an airbrush. The veins in the leaves are perfect and the acorns tie the theme together.

  6. I love this idea! I was expecting some complicated technique that I wouldn’t have time to learn to do, but this is totally manageable! do you happen to remember how many cookies you were able to frost with the cans of spray on? So excited to try this!

  7. It’s a few years down the line, but I’ve done Autumn leaves cookies for a few years for the Halloween/Thanksgiving season. I use royal icing, but the uneven spray with a contrasting base color is the same. I usually wait until the royal icing is completely set before spraying, so no veins on mine, but I did grab some fine tip edible markers last year with the intention of drawing some. I do like the texture that the vein inventions add to the frosting surface…and I’m loving the acorns!
    I just finished a batch iced in 4 shades of yellow to dark orange, sprayed with orange and red, then just a fine mist of gold over the entire cookie (think misting perfume in the air to walk through) for a lovely warm sheen.
    This all came out of leftover silver Color Mist I’d gotten for a Halloween costume for my boyfriend ( Nux from Mad Max: Fury Road…anyone? Yeah, no one had seen it that year either), and I was looking for something that I could flood or dip in a single color and embellish later. (I’d executed some very intricate and time-consuming multicolor royal icing designs before.)
    My best tip is to grab some seasonal stencils at a hobby shop and get creative. My first use of the Color Mist was plain white-iced round cookies with stenciled gold and silver snowflakes…overlapped, centered, random all look great. The autumn cookie cutters were ordered soon after.
    I will say that the Wilton brand is better than other spray food coloring, with a finer mist. And when layering colors or applying too much, just like spraypaint, the colors will flash together in the solvent, resulting in mottling, which can actually be a really eye-catching effect of that’s what you’re looking for.

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