Personalized Valentine Cookies

Here is a fun alternative to the traditional paper valentine- cookie valentines!

Every Valentine’s day my mom would make the most delicious sugar cookies.  They were soft moist cookies with fluffy pink peppermint icing and a little cinnamon heart on top.  Her secret?  She bakes the cookies at least one to two days ahead of time.  When she rolls the dough she leaves it a little thicker than the recipe says.  After the cookies are baked and iced she seals them in an airtight container for one to two days before eating.  No more hard puck sugar cookies!

I have continued on my mom’s tradition of baking cookies on Valentine’s day, I wanted to share these ones that I made for my son’s class last year.  I am not a great cookie decorator by any means, you can see that some of mine were very sloppy ( The red spots were an after thought when I accidentally spilled some red icing on a few of them!) but I still think they turned out very pretty.

I used my mom’s standard sugar cookie recipe from Company’s Coming you can find that recipe here: Sugar Cookie Recipe, just remember to roll the dough a little thicker (about 5mm), this also means that the recipe will not yield 7 dozen cookies, more like 3 1/2 dozen cookies.  You will also need to bake them a little longer, just watch your first batch.  Pull them out when the edges are slightly golden brown.

My favorite blog to look at for cookie ideas is The Adventures of Sweet Sugarbelle, this lady is amazing!!  I use her recipe for royal icing,  I highly recommend it.  Here is her recipe: Royal Icing.  Before you make it, you should read all of her tips, plus this great little article about coloring and preparing the icing so that you have the right consistency for piping: Coloring and Preparing Royal Icing

Now that you have read all of that information, I can tell you how I made these cookies.  You will need:

• Baked round cookies
• White royal icing, flood consistency
• White royal icing, piping consistency
• Red royal icing, flood consistency
• Black (or red) royal icing, piping consistency
• Black edible food marker

First you will use your white royal icing, piping consistency to pipe a circle border around the edge of your cookie.  Let it dry, do some house cleaning or play with your children.  Once it is dry (about 30 minutes) use your white royal icing, flood consistency, to fill your cookie inside of your circle border.  Again you will need to let the icing dry and harden before you do any more cookie decorating.  When it is dry you can use the food marker to write each person’s name on their own personalized Valentine cookie.  Next take your black or red royal icing that is piping consistency and pipe a heart onto the cookie.  To make it a little easier, you can also draw a heart onto your cookie with the edible marker so that you have a guideline to work with, and then pipe the icing over top.  Again you will need to let the piped icing dry before working on the last step.  The last step is to fill the heart in with red flood icing.  After the icing dries your cookies are finished! I thought these cookies were a great (and yummy!) alternative to a traditional paper Valentine, I hope you enjoy them! Thanks for stopping by,