I know, I know….already the grand majority of you are grumbling about how Valentine’s Day is a “holiday made up by the marketing industry”, but can we all take a second and appreciate how we need SOMETHING to get us from the post-holiday blues of January to the blue skies and melting snow of Spring Break?!! If a few heart-shaped cookies brighten someone’s day, isn’t that worth something?!!?

I’m probably the least romantic person in the world, but Valentine’s Day has always felt like the perfect excuse to share love with my family and friends, and this little project is a fun one for little hands AND big ones. Paint these with a group of friends, invite your niece and nephew over to paint them with you, or paint them and deliver them to your neighbours. This is one of those food projects that really cannot be messed up, and they are just SO PRETTY. Aren’t they??

If you are feeling intimidated by using royal icing, please don’t. If you make it the right consistency and have the right size piping tip, you can easily line out the hearts and fill them in. When I make these with my kids, I bake them one night after they go to bed, wait until they are completely cool and pipe them, and then leave them overnight on the baking rack to really set. Then I can store them in a sealed container for upwards of a week until we’re ready to paint them! The key is really letting that royal icing set before you store them and paint them. Read on, and learn how to make these Watercolour Valentine’s Hearts, and share your cookie art with me by tagging me @alittlesaltblog on the ol’ Instagram!

Recipe

Watercolour Valentine’s Hearts

Ingredients

Heart-shaped sugar cookies (these can be store-bought, but I like to make Sally’s Baking Addiction sugar cookie recipe)
Royal icing (my go-to is Anna Olson’s recipe for royal icing)
Food colouring
Almond extract or clear vanilla extract
Fine paint brushes in various styles

Directions

On completely cooled and set sugar cookies, carefully pipe royal icing onto the face of the cookie. With the piping tip at a 45 degree angle, slowly pipe the outline of the heart, and then carefully fill the inside. Allow to dry completely, overnight if possible.
After icing is set, create your colours. In small shallow dishes, or teacup saucers, mix your colours. Add about 1/2 tsp to 1 tsp of extract to the dish, and then use a toothpick to dip into the food colouring and then dip/roll the toothpick in the extract. You don’t need a lot of colouring, if you want the colours to be muted like mine are in the picture! Have fun with it, start small and you can always add colouring to make the colours more concentrated.
Use the brush to dab colour on the cookie. The brush doesn’t need to be super wet, just lightly dab it in the colouring and lightly dab on the cookie. This is where you really can’t go wrong. The extract will do its job to create the watercolour effect!
The cookies keep for quite a long time. We painted ours and they lasted in a sealed container for two weeks!