valentine's conversation heart cookies

Well here it is, at the end of April, and I'm only now getting around to posting the cookies that I made for Valentine's Day! Better late than never, right? ;)

So for Melodie's class Valentine's party this year, one available item on the sign-up sheet immediately caught my eye ... COOKIES. As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to make these adorable conversation heart cookies that I had recently seen on Martha Stewart's site!

I ended up using my own trustworthy sugar cookie and royal icing recipes from my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book, but you could of course go with Martha's recipe as well.

After I had baked and cooled my cookies, I outlined them with stiff icing, and then filled them in with runny icing.

I chose to stick to the cookie colors white, pink, pastel green, and yellow. Once I had let them dry overnight, instead of using a stamp like Martha does, I used red stiff icing (with the smallest tip, a Wilton #1 tip) to pipe cute messages on the cookies.

And for the final touch, I used stiff icing to pipe a final outline around each heart cookie.

The color combination is just too cute!

Happy belated Valentine's Day! :)