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Valentine’s Day Cookies
7:58

Valentine’s Day Cookies

Karen D
Posted by Karen D on Jan 31, 2025

 

Decorating cookies is so much fun for me! I love my “go-to” royal icing recipe, and I completely enjoy the focus it takes to decorate really pretty cookies.

Christmas Cookies

But with Valentine’s Day arriving so quickly after the Christmas season, I find myself looking for a simpler cookie decoration, something that comes together in minutes instead of hours – or days! So, if Valentine’s Day has you in the mood to create some pretty little cookies for the special people in your life, I wanted to give you a few simple ideas to get you going.

Cookie cuttersYou can bake your own cookies or buy them. I made a batch of two heart sizes: 2” across and 1” across. I feel like a mix makes a tray of cookies more interesting and, besides, sometimes all you want is a little cookie bite! If you bake your own, just be sure they are completely cool before you start decorating. You can even bake them ahead of time and store them in a cookie tin for a day or two before you decorate them.

Cookie decorating miseIn addition to the cookies, you’ll need your choice of sprinkles for decorating. I had a pink mix as well as red in my “sprinkles stash”. I poured the sprinkles into shallow bowls wide enough to accommodate a cookie if it was plunked down in the middle. In order for the sprinkles to stick to the cookies, you will also need some “heavy simple syrup” (which I’ll talk about in a moment), along with a stiff little paint brush to apply it. I also like to keep a small bowl of water handy to rinse off my brush between cookies. By the way, the brush is nothing fancy – I think mine came from a set from the Dollar Store!

Lastly, if you’re feeling a little adventuresome and want to try playing with edible glitter, I’ll show you a way to apply both gold glitter and red glitter. The glitter will get dusted onto the cookie using the little tea strainer you see in the photo above. The mesh is quite fine, but the glitter is more so! On its own, the glitter is so fine that it needs to be mixed with something slightly more coarse so it doesn’t all slip right through the strainer. You can see in the photo above that the gold glitter is already mixed with some cocoa powder, since I had this mixture left over from some holiday decorating. I will show you later how to mix the red glitter with some confectioner’s sugar. Edible glitter may be purchased online, either from baking sources or Amazon; be sure to specify “edible”!

Let’s talk for just a moment about simple syrup. I promise, this is the only “cooking” you’ll have to do!

Simple syrup is often used in cocktails and desserts and is made by mixing together equal parts sugar and water. You can multiply or divide this, as needed, but the ratio remains the same. So, for one cup of sugar you will mix in one cup of water, bringing it just to a boil to ensure all the sugar has melted into the water. Once cooled, you can use it as you wish (and it stores well in the fridge). For decorating the cookies, however, I wanted something just a little thicker to give the sprinkles a bit of a stickier base. So, I doubled the sugar, meaning the ratio I used was 2 cups of sugar for one cup of water.

Simple syrupSimple syrup 2You can see in that before bringing the mixture to a boil, the sugar doesn’t blend completely with the water. However, after bringing it to a boil, the sugar has been fully blended and the mixture is quite clear. Be sure to bring the mixture just to a boil; there is no need to let it continue boiling, as the liquid will reduce too much.

Now on to the fun part!

We’re going to start with some sprinkle-covered cookies. I like to work on parchment-lined sheet pans. This way, any overflow of sprinkles are easily shaken off the parchment, and I don’t have to chase them around my countertop! 

With the entire cookie covered in sprinkles, it’s kind of dramatic in a fun way! One thing I didn’t mention in the video is that you’ll want to set them aside for about 15-20 minutes so the syrup dries and keeps all those lovely sprinkles in place.

Now here’s a variation on this method, with just the edges of the cookies getting the sprinkle treatment. I like this for those who prefer a bit less sugar – but just as much fun! 

As you can see, this is just a variation of the first method. You will still use your heavy simple syrup as the glue to hold the sprinkles in place. I demonstrated this on the smaller cookies, but you can just as easily do this technique on a larger cookies.

Now we’ll move on to using edible glitter dust instead of sprinkles. You won’t need your heavy simple syrup for this, so we’re putting that away for now. As I alluded to at the beginning, the glitter dust will be dusted over the tops of the cookies using a fine-mesh sieve. But since most cooking sieves are way too large for this task, I like using my little tea strainer for this. I also mentioned that you need to mix the glitter dust with something else to dust the cookies in this way. Today I’m using a mixture of cocoa powder with the gold glitter dust and confectioner’s sugar with the red glitter dust. You could just as easily reverse these and do cocoa/red or confectioner’s sugar/gold. Plus there are a bunch of other colors out there for you to play with. But since we’re talking Valentine’s Day cookies, I thought using gold with a hint of chocolate and sparkly red and white would make for good options. Here's how to mix your glitter dust concoctions.

Now, let’s play with glitter dust! Glitter dust seems to get into every nook, cranny and crevice available if you don’t contain it in some way. To that end, I use a separate parchment-lined sheet pan for each color of glitter dust. I like to use quarter sheet pans for this, but it really doesn’t matter, just use whatever you have. It really does help to keep the glitter dust from spreading around.

Here's how to cover your cookie with the gold glitter+cocoa powder mixture:

Now let’s do the same thing with the red glitter+confectioner’s sugar mixture:

And now for a little twist! Let’s decorate with both glitter dust mixtures! I’ll show you a little trick with a simple piece of printer paper. Take a look:

Isn’t that fun? It makes you look like a pro with so little effort!

I have one more decorating option, just to give you another alternative. You’ll need to get your sprinkles and heavy simple syrup out again for this. Do you remember those candy “conversation hearts” from when we were kids? The ones with the little messages printed on them, things like “Be Mine” or “Luv U”? Well, I recently bought a bag and I was so disappointed! It was a brand-name bag of candy and some of the messages were either smudged or so far off-center that they weren’t even complete. Others were way too light to be readable (even with my readers!). So, I pulled out my fine-tip edible markers (again, thank you Amazon!) and wrote my own little message on the backs of the hearts. Let me show you what I did… and how I used them to decorate the cookies. First, we’ll glue the candy hearts to the cookies.

And here is how to finish them off with some sprinkles.

 

I hope this has given you some ideas for a simpler approach to cookie decoration. Keep in mind that you can apply these same techniques to any cookies, any time of year. Think about green shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day or maybe red, white and blue stars for the Fourth of July! The possibilities are truly endless.

Look at this cookie tray - I can’t decide if I want to eat them or wear them as jewelry! Happy Valentine’s Day!

Cookie trayIf you’re looking for an especially fun way to share Valentine’s Day with someone, The Chopping Block is offering a number of Valentine’s Day dinner and brunch classes from February 13 – February 15. They promise to be both delightful and delicious – and they also appear to be filling up quickly, so do check out our class calendar for details.

See our class calendar

Topics: valentine, decorate, cookie, cookies, valentine's day, baking, decorating, sugar cookies

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