Valentine's Day Cookies by Craftcore

Valentine’s Day is next week, so in preparation, I’ve been decorating some Valentine’s Day cookies with various types of icing.

I’m no expert cookie decorator, but I enjoy trying.  I watch people who are amazingly talented on YouTube ice cookies, but my experience attempting to recreate those is limited.

Here are the results of my baking for Valentine’s Day this year.  I think when you look at them with a sweeping glance they look quite cute!  If you look closely, you’ll see my shaky piping (LOL).  So ignore that!

Here are the iced Valentine’s Day cookies:

Now my intention when sharing this blog post is not to portray myself as an expert.  My intention is to show you what not to do, while at the same time giving you some ideas for the icing designs.  Hopefully you will have better execution than me.

My goal while making these cookies was to use up some of my baking supplies that I’ve had kicking around my pantry for a while.  I used the following items to make this set of cookies, but you don’t need all of this or you can add even more.  Improvise!

This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I’ll receive a little commission at no extra cost to you if you make a purchase.  

My Go-To Icing Recipe

Ingredients:

  • 4 cups icing sugar
  • 1/2 cup shortening
  • 5 tbsp milk
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • food colouring (as desired)
  1. Beat together the icing sugar and shortening until creamy.
  2. Add the milk and vanilla and beat until mixed thoroughly.
  3. Add food colouring if desired and mix until colour is distributed.

I used the icing recipe above to make the piping icing for these cookies and adapted it to make the flood icing.

Piping Icing and Flood Icing

Unfortunately I was just shy of the required amount of icing sugar.  I probably had about 3.5 cups.  I went with it, but my icing’s consistency was not great.  It wasn’t terrible for the piping icing, but I wanted to make a thinner icing for filling in areas of the cookie.  So I would pipe around the edge of the cookie, then fill in the cookie with the flood icing.  To make the flood icing, I added a few tablespoons of water.  HOWEVER: wow, did this not work as expected!  You’ll see in my photos that I have this chunky icing instead of a smooth flood icing.  Oh no!  And since I had run out of icing sugar, I couldn’t thicken it back up.  Although it didn’t come out as expected, the icing was still delicious and had a unique look.

Colouring the Icing

I used 10 drops of red food colouring and 3 drops of yellow food colouring to make the pink icing.

For the white icing, I used premade, thick cream cheese icing that was leftover from a box of red velvet cake mix.  I didn’t end up icing that cake so I had it to use up.

For the red icing, I used a premade Wilton cookie icing,  Unlike my flood icing, this cookie icing was the perfect flooding consistency.  I really enjoyed using this product, especially since my homemade icing was a failure!

Alternative Valentine’s Day Cookie Shapes

Other than the quintessential heart shapes for Valentine’s Day, I used these other cookie cutter shapes: ice cream cones, circles, squares, and umbrellas.  Once you make them in the themed colours (red, pink, and white), they all seem festive.

Valentine’s Day Cookie Decorating Ideas

  • TRADITIONAL ICED COOKIE:
    On any shaped cookie, use piping icing to ice around the edge of the cookie.  Use flood icing to fill it in.
  • DOUBLE-DECKER COOKIE:
    In the centre of a large heart shaped cookie, lay down some thick icing.  Pipe around the edge of the cookie and fill in the remaining cookie.  Take a second smaller cookie and ice it as desired.  Stack it on top of the smaller cookie using the thick icing as a delicious glue.
  • SQUIGGLE SPIRAL
    Start by piping around the edge of the cookie, but instead of a smooth motion, slightly wiggle the piping bag to give it a squiggly look.  Then start spiraling inward to the centre of the cookie leaving space between the piping.  Fill it in with flood icing.
  • STRIPED HEART COOKIE
    Pipe around the edge of the cookie.  Pipe stripes across the cookie from one side to the other.  Either fill in all the stripes with the flood icing, or alternatively, fill in every-other stripe with flood icing.  You can also try piping with a thicker icing in the stripes.
  • SCALLOPED HEART COOKIE
    Pipe around the edge of the cookie.  At the widest part of the cookie, pipe a scallop design.  Leaving a small space, pile a second scalloped line.  Fill in the scalloped area with flood icing.
  • A ROSE BY ANOTHER NAME
    Use a thick icing and starting from the centre, pipe a dense spiral.It will look somewhat like a rose.  You can also sprinkle it with sugar icing if you wish.
  • SPOTTED UMBRELLA
    Pipe a border around the edge of the cookie.  Using a thick icing, pipe spots onto the cookie.  Fill in the remainder with flood icing.
  • SQUIGGLE BORDER
    Instead of piping a straight line border around the edge of the cookie, try to pipe a dense squiggle.  Fill it in with flood icing or just let the cookie show.
  • HEART WITHIN A HEART
    Pipe a border around the edge of a heart shaped cookie. Leaving a small gap, pipe another heart shape inside that border.  Fill in this area with flood icing to make a super-thick heart.  Leave the centre empty.

To see all of the cookie designs (some of the ideas above are not pictured because, well… they got eaten!), check out this video.  The end of the video shows all the cookie designs.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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