If you’re looking to up your cookie decorating game, then Sweet Talk Cookies is here for you. Author (and cookie decorator extraordinaire) Hayley Callaway starts with the basics and moves on to talk about lots of specific cookies and characters to recreate for your family and friends.

Callaway starts with the three steps of decorating cookies like these. First, there is the outlining, which you do with a royal icing that will create a border for the color on top of the cookie. Then there is the flooding, where you add the color to the inside of the outline with a glaze (although you can also use a watered-down version of the royal icing). And finally there is the Top decoration, which can be writing or details to a character or extras like sprinkles, edible glitter, or silver or gold dust.

Then she talks supplies, naming names for her favorite kinds of pastry bags and piping tips, squeeze bottles, food coloring, and cookie cutters. She talks pantry tools like parchment paper and spatulas. And then she gets into her recipes. There is the OG Sugar Cookie Recipe, Gingerbread Cut-out Cookies, Chocolate Cut-out Cookies, and options for adding other flavors or for going gluten-free. Then there are the recipes for her Glaze and her Royal Icing, along with troubleshooting help, storage tips, color mixing, and help for getting the icing into the pastry bags.

She also talks about other decorating ideas, like stenciling, airbrushing, and writing on cookies. She offers ideas for extras like adding flowers or designs as well as ideas for incorporating things like sprinkles into your design.

Then she goes into specific designs. Callaway starts with animals, showing ideas for decorating bear faces as well as bumblebees, farm animals, peace sign turkeys (she uses a peace sign cookie cutter and decorates it to look like a turkey), rainbow turtles, snowy penguins, and unicorns. Then she moves on to food, to show how she makes cookies that look like butter, a food truck, eggs and bacon, pineapples, lemons, pies, and coffee mugs.

Then it’s creative holiday cookies, like her Christmas Tree-Rex, Christmas cookie tray, Santa Claus faces, Rudolph the Sprinkle-Nose Reindeer faces, Christmas Trees, and Nutcracker cookies. But there are other holidays you can celebrate with cookies, so she also has decorated champagne (or beer) bottles, champagne flutes, disco balls, cat face Valentines, love notes, little bunnies, Dia de los Muertos sugar skulls, Jack-o-lantern cookies, fall leaf cookies, Hallo-weenie dog cookies, lollipop ghosts, stacks of presents, and tie-dye shirts.

And to add some fun techniques to your repertoire, there are also fancy seashells and mermaids, rainbow flowers, snow cone cookies, funky flower hearts, sunflowers and sunshine and watermelon, cowboy boots, carved woodgrain cookies, magic ombre hearts, and watercolor cactus. And throughout, there are ideas for taking basic cookie shapes and adding text to bring some sass or humor to the part. To help with those, there are some font ideas that you can practice with, until you find and perfect your own decorating writing style.

I really like how Sweet Talk Cookies takes you through the decorating step by step. There are lots of photos to show how the layers of icing add excitement to the cookies, and there are so many great ideas for decorating a variety of cookies here. If you’re like me, someone who likes to bake but is more aspirational when it comes to decorating, this is a fantastic book to help me visualize how professionals decorate their cookies so that they look so good on social media.

I’m not sure I have the artistic skill to make any of these cookies, but there are certainly some I could start with, and maybe I could grow into the more complicated designs. But for anyone who watches those cookie decorating competitions (I’ve got my hand up—in fact, there is one on right now), wondering if there was a way for a decorating novice like me to make beautiful designs like those that win, Sweet Talk Cookies is a great first step to move me in the right direction. This would also make a great gift before the big December holiday to learn more polished cookie decorating, or for the big holiday, so the baker has all year to practice.

Egalleys for Sweet Talk Cookies were provided by Quarto Group through Edelweiss, with many thanks.