Beautiful Hearts with Royal Icing and Fondant

Simple Circle cookies with royal icing and fondant accents

I like making my own fondant embellishments. For more info look at this post.

I absolutely love Lilaloa's chocolate cookie recipe. I thought I would never go through my Costco size cocoa powder but now it's gone. I think I'm addicted to these chocolate cookies. One of the great things about this recipe is that it as long as you have your butter nice ready at room temperature it goes fairly quickly.

Here are some chocolate cookie tips.

#1) stick with Lilaloa's recipe. Use the best ingredients you can afford. I've tried this with fancy cocoa powder and they were amazing. I want to try this with a mix of dark and regular chocolates. Just like I do with my favorite drop cookie recipe.

#2) Once my dough pulls away from the sides I know it's done. I'm using the Bosche mixer here. I'm so superstitious about my royal icing I mix my dough in the Bosch and only royal icing in the kitchenaid. I don't think the kitchenaid is happy about this, but the whole oil in the icing thing scares me.

#3) When you can buy a silcone rolling pin and the rubber bands to keep the dough even. I love these two tools. I am rolling at a 1/4 inch thickness.

4) It's not necessary for this cookie, but out of habit I'm chilling the cut cookies in the freezer for a bit. It will soon be summer in Phoenix and I will be relying on this technique a lot more as the temperature in my house rises.

5) Bake on a silpat. I recently did a side by side comparison between parchment and silpat baking and I had less spreading with the silicon mat... such an easy clean up as well. I let them cool on the baking sheet.

Now I am simply outlining the cookies with a thick royal icing and will flood them with a thinner royal icing. I need to practice taking pictures while I decorate. I still haven't figured out how to flood a cookie and take a picture at the same time.

Allow the icing to set for just a moment and ever so carefully drop the heart in the center of the cookie. If it falls in the wrong place, eat that cookie. YUM! Ideally, in the end it will look like the heart is sitting on a soft pillow. I love heart cookies. I think they can work for so many different events. The ones I did here are about 1 1/2 inches across.

This is a great choice if you're not a big fan of food dyes and if you don't like that break my tooth feeling from royal icing layered upon more royal icing.

Happy Baking!

Alexandra's Simple Sugar Cookies

I have a daughter who doesn't like frosting or chocolate, so we make these. I've been trying to turn the TV off on weekdays and when she complained of being sooo bored we made the quick sugar cookie recipe by sweetsugarbelle. I like this version because it is by weight and we get to use the digital scale. (a must have for the kitchen!)
Here she is rolling it out between two sheets of parchment paper. This makes the process much neater, especially with kids. No flour everywhere and no little hands touching dough. Put a little bit of water under the parchment paper to get it to stick to the counter. I love these pre-cut sheets and try not to stress about using too many each time we bake.

I included this picture because it has one of my all-time favorite kitchen tools - a very thin metal spatula. It makes it so easy to lift the shapes without touching the dough.

I found this container of sprinkles at Smart and Final for about $5 or $6. Not the best price but the store is close to my house. I love the texture that these sugar crystals add to the cookie. It gives a nice crunch and just a hint of sweetness.

We added the sprinkles three different ways, first we just sprinkled them on. I don't like all the waste.
On the next batch we carefully pressed the dough into the sprinkles. This works for easy shapes like hearts.

The last group of cookies were done by kneading the sanding sugar into the dough. These came out cute and again I like the texture of the crystals. I would add a little frosting to these but we will keep these plain for Alexandra.
Here they are all lined up, you can see how the look changes depending on how the sprinkles were added.

And how do you not eat the cookies? After baking and cooling put together individual serving sizes of these and "hide" them in the freezer. The kids take these in their lunches and my brain sometimes forgets to look in the freezer for something to munch on. By the time they eat lunch they are just the right temperature. I'm too lazy to defrost a frozen cookie for a snack.