Valentine's Day Cookies (2024)

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These Valentine’s Day Cookies are a cut out sugar cookie decorated with an easy royal icing. These cut out sugar cookies are made with just 7 ingredients in one bowl and they hold their shape when baked! I’ll show you how to decorate them simply with icing or with dehydrated strawberries.

Dress up your Valentine’s Day or Galentine’s Day cookies with a little royal icing, crushed strawberries, white sprinkles or rose petals. The sugar cookie recipe uses melted butter and can be mixed by hand in one bowl. Roll out immediately before refrigerating.

I used my royal icing with meringue powder for these heart shaped sugar cookies but you could also use this easy cookie icing instead. Omit the food dye and decorate plain white icing with rose petals, dehydrated strawberries and white sprinkles.

Professional Tips for Making Valentine Cookies

• Roll the dough immediately. This dough firms up when refrigerated, so it is best to roll it immediately after mixing. This also makes for a faster chill time!
• Reroll & cut the scraps. This dough is rolled using two pieces of parchment paper, which means you can press all the scraps together and roll back out again and again! Using parchment eliminates the need for bench flour, so the third round will taste just as good as the first!
• Decorate with any icing you want! I love the flavor of royal icing but my easy cookie icing is also an excellent choice. You could also use this cream cheese icing for cookies for a fun twist.

Ingredients Needed

• All-Purpose Flour: Both all-purpose flour or pastry flour would work in these cookies. There is just enough gluten to create structure without making them tough. Don’t even consider looking at bread flour in this recipe. No, ma’am.
• Baking Powder: There is just enough baking powder to leaven these cookies without making them puffy. Too much will create a dome on the top of the cookies.
• Kosher Salt
• Butter: I use unsalted butter for baking, because you want to control the amount of salt you are adding. The melted butter adds fat and moisture and makes these simple cookies chewy and soft.
• Granulated Sugar: There is just enough sugar for the perfect flavor, but not so much that makes the cookies spread. Unlike chewy sugar cookies, which are intended to spread, these soft sugar cookies hold their shape.
• Whole Egg: The eggs are here to add fat, moisture and emulsify the dough. The fat from the yolk adds richness and helps keep the cookies chewy.
• Vanilla Extract

How to Make Valentine’s Day Cookies

Use these instructions to make decorated heart cookies! This tutorial will focus on the decorating. You can find more detailed instructions for the cut out sugar cookies in this post or more than you even knew you could know about royal icing in this post!

Make & Bake the Cookies:

Step 1: In a large bowl whisk together flour, baking powder, and kosher salt. Set aside. Whisk the butter and the sugar together in a large bowl, followed by the egg and vanilla. Whisk vigorously until the mixture is emulsified. You shouldn’t see any streaks of butter or egg. Last, slowly stir in the flour mixture.

It does look like a dry dough, so I like to finish by hand, squeezing the dough together. This incorporates the flour faster without developing too much gluten.

Step 2: Roll your dough while it is at room temperature. Roll the dough to approximately ¼ inch. You will have the best results if rolled between two pieces of parchment, but you can also roll out on a lightly floured surface. Refrigerate the dough until chilled.

This will only take 30 minutes, but I like to give it a full 2 hours or overnight to let the gluten relax.

Step 3: When you are ready to bake, preheat your oven to 325° F convection or 350° F conventional, and line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Unstick the parchment from both sides of the dough, then cut shapes with a heart shaped cookie cutter. Chill the cookies before baking. It will only take about 20 minutes.

Step 4: Bake in preheated oven for 7-9 minutes or until the cookies look matte in the center and have a few small cracks. Some of the edges might have begun to brown. Cool completely before icing.

Make Royal Icing:

Step 1: In a large bowl or in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, combine the dried egg whites (or meringue powder) and lemon juice. Whisk until soft peaks form.

Step 2: Add all the powdered sugar and whisk to combine. Separate the icing into different bowls and add food dye. Be sure to keep an eye on the consistency and stop adding if it gets too thin.

I recommend using gel food coloring for the most vibrant colors. You can use liquid food coloring but the resulting icing will be pastel. If you add enough for vibrant colors, the icing will be too thin to set or outline.

Step 3: For outlining using the ribbon test. The icing should cascade slowly off your spatula and remaining clearly visible on the surface for a few moments (about 5-6 seconds) before slowly disappearing.

Step 4: For flooding using the same ribbon test, the icing should cascade off your spatula and almost disappear instantly into the rest of the icing.

You can make the icing too thin and then it won’t set hard. It will take a little practice to get your perfect consistency: thin enough to easily spread but not so thin as to not set or be transparent.

Step 5: Transfer outline and flooding icings to separate bags.

How to decorate cookies for Valentine’s Day:

Step 1: Starting smaller than you think, cut the tip off the outline piping bag. Test a line. If it squiggles when you squeeze it, cut it just a little bigger. Test and repeat until you get a thin straight line. Repeat the same process with the flooding bag but cut it large enough to get a nice flow of icing without squeezing too hard.

Step 2: Working with 1-3 cookies at a time, use the outline bag to trace the outline of the cookie. Leave a 1/16^th in border around the edges so it doesn’t run off the cookie!

Step 3: Switch to the flooding bag and squeeze a squiggle of icing inside the outline across the cookie you are icing. Use a cake tester, wooden skewer, or be lazy like me and use the tip of the flooding piping bag, to spread the icing around into one even layer.

You should not be able to see the cookie through the icing, but it should not be so thick that it flows over the outline. The outline should blend perfectly with the filling. If it doesn’t and you have a visible line, you can try to blend them or you can just outline fewer cookies before flooding next time.

Step 4: To make the little hearts, you will need to work quickly. I typically only decorate 1 cookie at a time when doing this technique. Make dots of the second color along the edges or wherever you want the hearts. Take a cake tester or toothpick and drag the tip through the center of each dot. This will make little hearts!

Step 5: For the other style of heart cookies, decorate up to 3 cookies with the icing then sprinkle on your décor. Try crushed dehydrated strawberries or blueberries, sprinkles, mini hearts, or gold jimmies. The options are limitless.

Frequently Asked Questions