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a Valentine Sugar Cookie with Royal Icing on a plate with little red and white hearts on a pink background
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Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing

These Valentine's Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing are easy enough for children to do but look professional. This is a fun activity for both kids and adults!
Course Dessert
Cuisine American
Prep Time 1 hour
Dry TIme 1 day
Total Time 1 day 1 hour
Servings 20 cookies (approx.)
Author Meghan

Equipment

  • 1 Small round piping tip such as a Wilton #5
  • 1 Plastic tip coupler recommended
  • 1 Disposable piping bag
  • 3 Plastic squeeze bottles 16 ounce size
  • toothpicks

Ingredients

  • 1 batch of your favorite shortbread or sugar cookies
  • 1 batch of Easy Royal Icing
  • Pink and red food coloring gel red no-taste gel preferred

Instructions

Roll and Bake the Cookies:

  • Roll your sugar cookie dough to ¼-inch thick for a sturdy cookie suitable for decorating.
  • Bake the cookies according to the instructions in your recipe and let cool completely before outlining with royal icing.

Outline the Cookies:

  • Make a batch of Royal Icing. Remove some of the "stock" icing to a bowl and add small amounts of warm water until you reach outline consistency icing.
  • Transfer the icing to a disposable piping bag fitted with a small round tip.
  • Outline each cookie with the white outline consistency icing.
  • Allow the icing outline to dry overnight before proceeding with flooding.

Prepare the Flood Consistency Icing:

  • Add small amounts of water to your stock of royal icing until you get a thin icing that runs easily.
  • Pour ⅓ of your flood consistency icing into a squeeze bottle and ⅓ into each of two bowls. Tint one bowl with pink food coloring gel and other bowl with red food coloring gel. Transfer the pink and red flood icing to squeeze bottles.
  • If you will not be doing the flooding right away, make sure to close the lids on your squeeze bottles or wrap the opening tightly in plastic wrap to avoid crusting.

Flooding and Wet on Wet Technique:

  • Plan to work quickly through these steps, as the icing can dry fast depending on the temperature and humidity of the room. Fill the entire space inside the outline with the color of flood icing that you want to be the main color of the cookie. You can use a toothpick to help guide the flood to the edges. This will help you avoid putting so much that it spills over the outline.
    a hand squeezing red royal icing onto a heart shaped sugar cookie
  • Add dots of the color you would like to be the small hearts. You can do a single color, multiple colors, or even an initial larger dot and then a smaller dot of another color on top of that dot which will end up giving the effect of a heart within a heart.
    a hand squeezing white royal icing onto a cookie
  • Drag a toothpick through the dots to connect them. This creates a heart pattern. You can do them all going the same direction or switch direction if you prefer.
    a red royal icing cookie with a hand pulling a toothpick through white dots
  • Allow the cookies to air dry at room temperature for about 24 hours to completely set the icing. This timing is ideal if you plan to package the cookies in treat bags.
    a heart shaped sugar cookie decorated with pink, red and white little hearts

Notes

Store the cookies either in a single layer in an airtight container at room temperature, or if you need to stack the cookies, add a layer of aluminum foil between the layers of cookies.
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