Cake Thoughts: Happy Valentines Day Cookies

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Happy Valentines Day Cookies

Happy Valentines Day! Love is in the air, well actually, that's the sweet smell of sugar cookies baking in the air. Louise at Cake Journal totally inspired me to jump into cookie decorating. Her cookies are absolutely gorgeous! You can some of her wonderful work here. I have been pretty busy lately with cakes and cupcakes, and I thought my honey would appreciate something different for his Valentine's treat. Now I have made and decorated my fair share of Christmas cookies, so I wasn't totally in the dark here. But some techniques, like flooding the cookies with royal icing, were completely new to me. This was also my first time making cookie lollies, which was pretty easy and a lot of fun. Enjoy the pictures and have a wonderful Valentines day!

I made my cookie dough in the stand mixer, divided it in half, and wrapped each half in plastic wrap, and put them into the refrigerator for half an hour. The cookies roll out and cut so much better when chilled. A chilled cookie also keeps it shape better when baking, instead of spreading out. I rolled out my dough about 1/4" thich on lightly floured parchment paper, and then cut out my cookies. I made heart shaped cookie lollies with one half of my dough. The other half I made regular heart shaped cookies, and some fancy scrolled shape cookies.

Here some heart shaped cookies go into the oven. I highly reccomend baking them on parchment paper! Not only do the cookies not stick to the pan, but it makes cleaning up so much easier!

Here are my fancy scroll shape cookies, waiting patiently to go into the oven.

This is one of my heart shaped cookie lollies, post baking. Making the cookie lollie was pretty simple. I followed the excellent tutorial posted on Cake Journal.

After baking all of my cookies, I let them all cool for about four hours. And then it was time to decorate! I made royal icing and divided it into three parts. I tinted one part pastel pink, one part mint green and left one part white. When decorating, I outlined some cookies and then flooded with icing. Some I just outlined and decorated with dragee's and sprinkles. And since I had some edible pearl dust in my decorating supply box, I did a little experimenting. I mixed a little pearl dust and some vanilla extract in a small painters pallete, and painted a cookie that had already been flooded with icing and dried. It's pretty important that the icing is dry, or this will not work.