Lawrence.com

It's no secret that I'm not much of a baker. I'm a goddess of cake mixes, ice cream parfaits, roasted pears and other "fake out" desserts. One of the few things I do well is make cookies, and even then, I only have a handful of go-to recipes that work well for me. One of those favorite recipes is my sugar cookie recipe, which I whip out several times a year, for Christmas, birthdays and Valentine's Day.

This year, I made a lot of heart-shaped cookies, and I wanted to fancy them up a bit because I'd be sending most of them to the Lawrence Memorial Hospital Valentine's Day bake sale. This gave me some pause, seeing as I am not coordinated, have zero artistic talent, and am a general failure at all things confection. Still, I wanted to try my hand at making royal icing and outlining the cookies and then flooding them instead of using my usual method of dumping some orange juice in powdered sugar and spilling a bit of it over each cookie.

Also, just for fun, I wanted to make cookie "pops," similar to but not to be confused with the cake pops that have recently captured the imaginations of bakers and bloggers far and wide. Because everything is more fun if it's on a stick.

So I pulled out all my Valentine cookie cutters, and put Lindsey to work in my kitchen while our kids ate their weight in rice krispie treats and frozen pizzas. Mothers of the year, we are.

kids feast by meganstuke

My trusty sugar cookie recipe did not fail, even with doubling it to produce the volume of cookies we were looking for. We cut out small hearts, X's and O's, big hearts, double hearts, and lips, and in most of them we inserted a stick about a third of the way into the bottom of the cookie. If you are going to do these cookie pops, you need to roll your cookies out thicker than you normally would, so be prepared to get a few less cookies per batch than you might be used to getting.

Tired from the cutting, rolling, baking and repeating, I put the cookies away after they cooled to frost the next day.

I made a simply royal icing. First, you want a stiff icing, for piping around the exterior of the cookie or for forming out whatever shapes you think you will need (for example, I freehanded small center "holes" in the middle of my "O" cookies.)

Some people like to make this with egg whites, and that is a good option if A) you aren't afraid of raw eggs, and B) you don't have any meringue powder laying around. But I did happen to have a bag of meringue powder I'd picked up at a cookie decorating class at Sweet! in downtown Lawrence, so I was happy to take the easier (and potentially safer) way out.

lotsa cookies by meganstuke

Stiff Royal Icing for Piping

4 cups confectioner's sugar
3 tablespoons meringue powder
1/2 cup warm water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or other extract, whatever you like)

Combine the dry ingredients thoroughly, and then beat with a mixer after adding the water and extract on a medium high speed for about five minutes, until the icing is glossy and forms stiff peaks.

Affix your pastry bag with a fairly small piping tip, and spoon some frosting in. I like to fold the bag down halfway, spoon about a half a cup of icing in, push it down to get the air out, twist above the frosting, and then begin frosting. Too much frosting in the bag and you'll have a mess on your hands. Literally, the frosting might squeeze out the top of the bag and get all over your hands.

If you are a better person than I, you will pipe slowly and carefully around your cookies and make intricate shapes. But I don't have time for precision like that. I slapped those hearts out as fast as I could. I did about 100 cookies, and still had a lot of icing left with which to fill.

lips by meganstuke

Take your icing bowl back to the mixer and add another half a cup of water, and beat again. Keep adding more water until you have a runny frosting that, when dropped by a spoonful back into itself does not maintain its shape, but disappears rather quickly back into the contents of the bowl.

Then I switched to a "fill" tip (though a squeeze bottle like the kind you get ketchup and mustard in in restaurants works very well) and began filling in the cookies. This is fun for me because it's not precise. I just drop a dollop of the runny fill icing onto the cookie and kind of smoosh it around until it's covered the required area.

fill tip by meganstuke

Lay your finished cookies flat for several hours to be sure they are dry. You can then pipe words or decorations on with more of the stiff royal icing if you remembered to reserve some. I didn't, so I just decorated everything with sprinkles and was happy.

big hearts on sticks by meganstuke

Here's hoping these babies make my Valentine's Day, as well as the Valentine's Day of some LMH employees, feel loved and happy and a little soft and crumbly, just like the cookies.

xo by meganstuke