Valentine's Day Cookies

I know it's a little late, but if you're anything like me, you've had your Valentine's Day treats planned for weeks now and have been getting really excited to make them! There have been so many great posts on other blogs this week and I'm thinking I might have to start celebrating Valentine's Day every day so that I can try out all the great ideas I've seen.

This year I made a couple things - cookies, cupcakes and ice cream! I'll slowly be posting those over the next few days, but today I'm going to share my heart shaped sugar cookies with you. I wanted to make them look like candy hearts since those are one of my favorite candies, but my piping skills aren't quite up to par so they didn't come out as planned. (Still tasty though!)

I recently purchased this Ateco food coloring. While I really love the bright vibrant colors, it's been making my royal icing a weird texture, and it hasn't been getting quite as hard as normal.

Here's the sugar cookie recipe I used, and I cut them into various sized hearts. Once cooled, pipe the outline onto the cookies using royal icing. Use a few drops of your favorite food coloring gel to tint the icing whatever color you'd like. To make the icing taste a little better, I added 1/2t of lemon juice. About 1/2 of the royal icing recipe should cover cookies from the whole dough recipe. Reserve a small amount of the icing for lettering.

Fill the cookies with flood icing and let sit overnight.



The next day (when dry), lay a large piece of parchment on the counter or table and sprinkle a generous amount of sanding sugar in the center. I used both white and bright pink sugar, but the white definitely looked better since it was a contrast to the cookie color.

Using the reserved icing, pipe on any words you'd like, and an outline. Immediately dip the cookie into the sanding sugar, then let sit to dry. Once all of the cookies are decorated, pour the excess sugar back into the container.

For the mini cookies, I used the outline icing to fill in the center of the cookies, then pressed a little harder when I put them in the sanding sugar so the icing would spread to the edges in a heart shape.

 

Package each cookies in a cellophane bag to prepare them for your Valentine...or to ship them to your friends and family (get ready Mom & Dad).