Easy but impressive decorated sugar cookies

While I have always enjoyed baking, it is when I started decorating sugar cookies that I discovered how pretty you can make desserts. It actually started two years ago when I made large plain pink sugar cookie hearts for my friends and wrote their names on them for a little V-day gift. They were delicious, beautiful, and didn't really take a ton of skill, just patience. The cookies I made this year for Valentines are the same way:



To make these cookies all you need are:
1) Heart shaped cut out cookies (I used a chocolate cookie I ended up not loving, use whatever recipie you like. It will work best if the cookies have a flat surface on top when they finish baking, nothing that rises too much)
2) 20 second royal icing (I use Wilton's recipie and add a little vanilla. Then you want to run a spatula through it and count the time till the surface is smooth again. It should take about 20 seconds. Add a little powder sugar if it takes less than 20 seconds and a little water if it takes more than 20 seconds)
3) A squeeze bottle like these Wilton ones
4) A ruler
5) A toothpick, or clean needle, or knife

The first thing you want to do is to take your cookie and draw a grid on it. I used the ruler to keep my lines straight and evenly spaced, but you could probably just wing it too. I used a toothpick to draw the lines in the cookie, but would recommend a clean needle or knife since I had to keep using new toothpicks



Once you finish scoring all your cookies (a nice activity to do while watching tv), brush the cookies off well (since you'll have little crumbs from scoring them) and grab your squeeze bottle filled with 20 second icing. Pick a square and outline it, then color it in, all with the same icing. 20 second icing is a good consistency that won't spread much.





I used the toothpick you see in the picture to pop any air bubbles that there are in the icing. Now you want to start filling in squares! I found it best to do every other row first like this:



This gave the corners a chance to dry a little so they didn't run into each other. Next you want to keep filling in squares but none that touch length wise, only corners, until your cookie looks like this. You can see a couple places where the corners ran together and don't look as sharp. Doing every other row helps get rid of that.:



Then put it aside and start your next cookie. After an hour or two you can go back to the first cookie and fill in the rest of the squares, the result is cookies that look like these:



Yes, it is a little time consuming, I would say it took me about 10 minutes to decorate each cookie from start to finish (not including drying time), but it's easy and pretty! I hope you'll give it a try sometime!