Love letter cookies

Hello Kakapos

As promised, here's the last few steps to creating your home made Valentine's love letter cookies. This, by far, is my favourite part! 

To flood a cookie, you'll find an excellent tutorial at Cake Journal. I learnt everything there is to know about cookie decorating from this blog. It's the best!

Now that you have a rough idea of what to do, start with your blank canvas: square cookies for the letters and envelopes; and heart cookies for the, well, hearts. 

Step 1. Squeeze an outline of thicker royal icing around your cookie. This icing needs to be thicker so it dries faster and holds its shape. Make sure there are no gaps, because when you flood your cookie it's this outline that holds all the runny icing in. Let it dry for at least 15 minutes. 

Step 2. Flood your cookies. You can water down your icing with a bit of water. Make sure you test it by piping an outline of a circle to see how fast it fills up. If the circle fills without much prompting, then you're pretty much good to go. 

Step 3. If you feel the need, throw on your sprinkles, sugars, and pretty much anything you'd like stuck to your cookie while the icing is wet. Time is of the essence, because little decorations like this won't stick when these babies are dry (unless you want to painstakingly affix each sprinkle with icing and let me tell you, you don't).

Step 4. But for the love of Pete, DO NOT write on or try to ice over your wet cookie. You'll need to let them dry for at least a good 2 hours before you ice over them. If you want to write on them, well, let me tell you, sir, you need to wait for at least 24 hours. It's not very pretty if your beautiful calligraphy bleeds everywhere. 

Step 5. Once you've let everything dry over night, package them up into little cellophane bags. Throw in some edible heart confetti, love heart sweets, maybe some glitter and then tie it all up with a cute ribbon. 

And there you have it! A beautiful little treat for someone you love. If you're a little nutty like me, you may decide to make about 60 of these bad boys and dispatch them to your friends and family, too. 

Oh how I love Valentine's Day!

Happy icing!

xx