
Making and Decorating PYO (Paint Your Own) Cookies


Paint Your Own (aka PYO) Cookies have been a cookie maker staple for a long time now. They are a great moneymaker for those that sell cookies, and a perfect gift to kids of all ages. The basic concept is that they are edible coloring pages. Creative and tasty?!? Sign me up!
They're easy to make, and while they do require some extra supplies, the end result is so worth it.
Bake and Ice Your Cookies
You will need to bake your cookies and allow to cool before icing. If you are covering your cookies with royal icing, they will need to be flooded a day ahead of stenciling and packaging. If you are using fondant, you can get all of this done in one day.
Here are our no-fail recipes:
- Ultimate Sugar Cookie Recipe
- Royal Icing Recipe OR use our Instant Royal Icing Mix
- Homemade Marshmallow Fondant
Add Your Design
PYO cookies are stencilled with a with designs specifically created for PYOs. They are usually fun, kid friendly illustrations, sometimes along a holiday or theme, that have lots of areas for painting and adding color. We sell some of our PYO stencils with matching cookie cutters. This is a great way to create a bespoke look. If you don't have a matching cookie cutter you can choose a basic or plaque shape that goes well with your chosen stencil. Here's a link to an in depth tutorial on how to stencil.
Most people stencil with black royal icing as it is the easiest to see the design and looks the most like a coloring book. I have seen people do white, or a color along the theme, and sometimes that can be fun too!


Ready, Set, Paint!
Now comes the fun part! Painting your cookies! If you are making these at home with your kids and are going to paint and eat them yourselves, you just need to wait long enough for the stenciled design to dry. This shouldn't take more than 20-30 minutes since it's such a small amount of icing.
For painting you'll need some PYO paint palettes. We make these at The Cookie Countess just for this purpose. It is edible, food color, paints that are activated with water - just like old school watercolors. Our Edible Paint Palettes come in multiple color combos and make prep and clean-up a snap.
If you are gifting or selling your PYO cookies, you'll need to plan ahead for packaging. We have a whole other tutorial on just that. You can find that here!


Watch the video:
Printable PYO Cookie Instruction Sheets
If you wish to get a printed instruction sheet on how to use PYO palettes, you can download that PDF here. This is great if you are selling or gifting PYO cookies.

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