Cookie Decorating Short Cut

I love the technique that I learned when I decorated some of my cut out cookies this year. In order to get this kind of coverage with royal icing, you need to pipe the outline around the cookies edge, then flood the cookie and spread it out to fill up the space. It takes about 5-10 minutes per cookie, depending on it's size, and the speed and dexterity of the person doing the decorating.
As an alternative, you can make the royal icing a bit thicker (the rule of thumb is that it should take about 6-7 seconds for a drop of the icing to meld back into the bowl. I am not a big fan of royal icing--sweet and boring--not a great flavor combination--but kids love it. You put enough royal icing in a pie plate to a thickness of about 1/2" . Using gel icing coloring, put about 4-5 drops of coloring into the pie pan--one at a time, in a circle about halfway between the middle of the pie plate and the edge.
To decorate, dip the cookie into the royal icing at a colored drop--when you pull the cookie up, that motion alone creates the swirls of color. Because the icing is a bit on the thick side, you have to kind of shake the excess icing off the cookie, then lay it on a cookie rack to dry completely--in a dry environment it takes 1-2 hours for them to dry enough to put them into cookies containers.
I decorated 6 dozen cookies in about 30". Hard to beat that!