Sweets for My Sweets

Love is in the air, friends! And soon to be in a few little tummies, too.

I'm really tickled with how these turned out for Big Sister's class party. There's still time to whip up something for your loves and these tasty little confections can be yours in a few simple steps.

Step One: I used a boxed gingerbread mix adapted for cookies, rolled out and cut hearts. Gingerbread still seems very seasonal and offsets the sugary icing, sprinkles (and then chocolate!) in a way that plain buttery sugar cookies don't.

Step 2: I iced them with royal icing (the back of a baby spoon works well to smooth the icing to the edges) and quickly dipped in colored sugar. (You'll see that I started with a little zig zag of royal icing thinking that would be plenty of decoration. Pure craziness.) Royal icing sets quickly so the cookies needed to be iced and sprinkled one at a time.

Step 3: They still seemed plain and a bit unfinished and we always have chocolate chips in the pantry, (and we have a pantry now! hooray!) so I melted a bowl's worth of dark chocolate and piped the edges. I prefer a baggie with the end snipped over a pastry bag. Clean up is a snap, too.

Step 4: Sample. Always. They are easy and cute. And because they're so sweet I kept them fairly small.

Be mine!

Oh! And I almost forgot (well I did forget but came back to add) that these were broiled if you can believe it. Our oven is due to be replaced (which also means I can talk about getting a new "hob" soon too) but the broiler works. I put them on the lowest rack and set the broiler to low. It took about 10-15 minutes (with lots of checking) and I let them cool longer on the cookie sheet before moving to a cooling rack. success! love! cookies!

xo.