Dancing Sun Cookies for Feast of Our Lady of Fatima

I was looking for a simple dessert that my daughter and I could whip up yesterday and serve at dinner to celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima.  I love the "Miracle of the Sun" cake posted by Anne on the Catholic Cuisine blog, but I knew that I needed something even simpler since we would only have about 30-45 minutes to create our dessert. Instead, I opted to embellish some plain vanilla cookies to make our  "Dancing Sun" dessert. Best of all, the most time consuming part of this project was the 15 minutes it took for the icing to dry on the cookies!

We used the following items to create our cookies: Vanilla wafers, white frosting, food coloring pens in red, orange and yellow; and decorating sugars in red, orange and yellow. Food coloring pens are often available in the cake decorating aisle of grocery stores or hobby stores. 

I originally planned just to use the food coloring pens to decorate the plain, unfrosted cookies, but the food coloring did not show up very brightly on the cookies, as you can see in this photo:

So, I decided to frost the cookies and then apply the designs. However, my daughter begged to use the colored sugars too.  So we decided to experiment with various techniques using the frosting.  I drew swirly designs (with frosting) on some of the cookies, then sprinkled then with the colored sugars.  My daughter frosted the whole cookie, then added dashes of orange, red and yellow sprinkles.  This is what they looked like:

Finally, we covered some of the cookies with white frosting and then let the frosting dry.  After it dried, we used the food color markers to create a swirly design with a red marker, then filled in the outline with the yellow and orange markers.  It was quite simple to do and the results are actually prettier than I can capture with my camera.  These two photos will give you an idea of the finished cookie:

I still have decorating sugars left, so I'm thinking about creating something similar for Pentecost featuring a "Holy Spirit" flame design.  And I bet the red decorating sugars and food coloring marker will come in handy for the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus...