Heart Shaped Cookies Recipes For Valentine’s Day

With Valentine’s Day approaching fast, it’s time to get your skates on and bake some tasty little treats with your little ones to celebrate the day of Luuuurve. We’ve come up with some great simple recipes that you can use to bake some heart-shaped cookies with the kids. They can share them with friends, add them to lunch boxes or, if they’re old enough, give them to their valentines.

Use the same basic cookie dough recipe for each variety:

INGREDIENTS 6 oz plain flour 4 oz margarine/butter 2 oz sugar

HOW TO Pre heat the oven to 180˚C/350˚F/Gas Mark 4. Sift flour into a large mixing bowl and add sugar. Rub in the butter/margarine until it looks like breadcrumbs. Bring the mixture together until it forms a ball. Roll out the dough to ¼” (6mm) thickness and cut using a heart shaped cutter. Bake on a lightly greased baking sheet for 12 – 15 minutes until golden brown. Transfer to a cooling rack and leave to cool before decorating.

If you’re using Royal Icing, this recipe is suitable for decorating cookies:

INGREDIENTS 1 egg white 1lb icing sugar (sifted) 1/2 tsp lemon juice

HOW TO Combine egg white and lemon juice in a large bowl. Add some of the icing sugar and mix well. Keep adding icing sugar a little at a time. When the mixture looks like thick whipped cream it’s ready. Cover with cling film or a damp cloth until you’re ready to use it.

Love Heart Valentine Cookies Divide the icing sugar into small bowls and colour each batch with food colouring. Spread onto your heart-shaped cookies and then use Writing Icing pens to add your Valentine messages to each cookie.

Chocolate Valentines Melt some chocolate (either in the microwave or in a bowl over a pan of boiling water) then dip each heart shaped cookie into the chocolate to half cover. Sprinkle with heart shaped sugar sprinkles available from your local supermarket) before the chocolate hardens.

Jewelled Valentine Cookies Before baking your heart shaped cookies, cut a circle out of each heart with a small pastry cutter or bottle top. Pop a coloured boiled sweet into the circles, then bake as usual. The cookies will each have a small jewel in the middle.