In my last post I shared the cookie recipe provided by Penny McConnell at the Capital Confectioners' Sugar Art and Cake Competition. For Valentine's Day this year, I decided to give her recipes a try and make cookies for my sweeties and my friend, Gloria, who was home sick.

The dough was perfect. It was heavy but soft. It rolled out beautifully and there was no need to refrigerate it overnight like so many sugar cookie recipes require. I rolled the cookie dough out about a quarter of an inch thick.

At the cake show, Penny showed us the coolest technique that I was just dying to try. Following her instructions, I took a chunk of dough and slowly added water until it was the consistency of buttercream and could be piped out of a piping bag. I then coloured the mixture using Americolor decorator gels. I spooned the mixture into paper piping cones and just cut the very tip off the cones. I then piped this mixture onto the cookies, outlining them in red and purple.

I have to say, I LOVE the Americolor gels. They come in squeeze bottles and the colours are more vibrant than Wilton's.


I popped the cookies into the oven at 325 and baked them for approximately 15 minutes a tray. I took them out of the oven and the piping was just as vibrant as when they went into the oven! They were so pretty, in fact, that I really didn't need to decorate them.

But, of course, I did anyway. Hey, they were for Valentine's Day, after all!

I made up the royal icing and decided to do a couple of different techniques. Firstly, I took some of the cookies that I had not outlined and dipped them in coloured icing. To do that, I watered down some of the royal icing and tinted some red and some purple. Why purple? Well, it happens to be my friend, Gloria's favourite colour. The icing has to be thin enough to dip the cookies but not so thin that it all runs off. You should be able to dip the cookies, pull them out, give them a little shake and set them on a drying rack, and have them look pretty smooth.

Next, I took the remaining thinned icing and thinned it even more to use as a flood colour for the outlined cookies. The cool thing about these cookies is that the outline already provided a dam so I didn't need to outline them with a thicker icing to hold in the flood colour. This icing should be fairly runny. I spooned it into piping cones and cut just the tip off. It's runny enough that it will run right out the tip and back up the cone and leave you a bit messy. I should have put gloves on right away but I didn't so I ended up with red hands for a bit. Ooops. Heh. I set these to dry, too. The outlined borders provided a pretty contrast to the icing.

I had some pretty sanding sugar in purple and a really nice red/gold and I dipped some cookies into the sanding sugar.

With a half dozen remaining cookies, I melted some dark chocolate and dipped half the hearts.


I let the cookies dry overnight and packed them up in pretty boxes the next day and delivered them to my loved ones. The cookies not only looked fabulous but they were also the best tasting sugar cookies I'd ever made.  They were big hit!

If you love beautiful and tasty sugar cookies please try this recipe yourself!

I just wish I'd thought to take a picture of them all boxed up.

(Edit: My girlfriend managed to snap a  few picture of her cookies. Yay.)