Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies!

Growing up, my great aunt, who was a nun, would make the most amazingly thin, delicious sugar cookies for Christmas and Easter. When she passed away in 2008, my Grandma started taking over the daunting, time consuming task. Over the last few years, she's asked us, the women in the family, to help her out. 

Somehow I became the patient, detailed one, who would ultimately inherit the recipe, cookie cutters and sugar sprinkles.

Last year, I found these adorable Conversation Heart Cookies from Cupcakes and Cashmere, but never had the time to make them. I had purchased the large heart cookie cutter and stored it away with the rest. This year, I was determined to make them! It ended up being a two day process, only because I started the cut outs late Monday afternoon and didn't know how long it would take to ice them all. 

The recipe I used for the sugar cookies is my Great Aunt's. Not sure if I'm allowed to share, but what Gram doesn't know won't hurt her...

Sugar Cookie Recipe:

1 pound (16 oz) sugar

1 pound (4 sticks) of room temperature butter

3 eggs

4 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

5-6 cups of flour

1. Cream sugar and butter until smooth. 

2. Add eggs and vanilla until well blended

3. Add flour, one cup at a time, along with salt and baking powder until you have a doughy consistency. I generally use 6 cups of flour for the dough itself. You'll use the remaining flour to roll out the dough and cut out the cookies. 

4. Roll dough out to 1/4 inch thickness, and cut out shapes.

5. Bake at 375 degrees for 4 minutes, then switch racks, and bake another 2-3 minutes. 

Royal Icing Recipe:

(adapted from here and here)

4 cups of powdered sugar

3 TBS meringue powder (mine is Wilton from Michael's)

10 TBS warm water

1 tsp clear vanilla extract

1 tsp clear almond extract

food coloring

Beat on low for 3 minutes, then on high for 5 minutes, until you get a thick consistency that peaks when you lift up the mixer. You can add your food coloring at this step, and mix until well blended. I decided to stick with one color since this was my first attempt at royal icing. I used a small cake icing spatula to spoon the icing into squeeze bottles. I used this consistency to outline the cookies like this:

It took a few tries to get the lines straight. I ended up outlining all 4 dozen cookies before beginning to flood them. In the future, I would recommend doing a tray at a time, and flooding as you go. My outlines hardened, and when I flooded the inside it smudged some of the outside. I did it my way so I could thin out the icing after I finished outlining. 

I added about 4-5 tsp of water to thin the icing out to get the consistency of the flooding icing. I spooned that into another squeeze bottle, and flooded away! I did these 6 cookies at a time so that the icing didn't harden while I was working. 

I used the tip of the squeeze bottle to swirl the icing around the edges and the plain, pink cookies ended up like this:

Finally, I had some of the flooding icing left over and decided to add some more red food coloring to make a darker red hue to add some fun stripes to some of the cookies. In retrospect, I should have added this accent color to a piping bag with a very small tip, since the icing bleeds. 

All in all, they taste delicious, which is the main point of a cookie, but they look cute too. I'll certainly have another go-round at these and will tweak my decorating techniques to hopefully get a cleaner look.