heart cookie pops on a stick

While I was making these conversation heart cookies for Valentine's Day this year, I thought it would also be fun to turn a few of the heart cookies into cookie pops! Just 'cause it's so fun eating snacks on sticks, right?

So using the same batch of sugar cookie dough (recipe in my book, The Hello Kitty Baking Book!), I cut out my hearts, and then placed them on top of lollipop sticks that I laid out on my baking sheet, gently pressing the dough to surround the stick. Then I baked them at 350F for 10-12 minutes until just golden.

You could kind of see indents in the baked cookies, from where I was pressing the dough, but I knew it would be fine since I was going to decorate them with royal icing.

Here you can see that the lollipop stick wasn't completely surrounded by cookie dough, but even so it still stayed and held together nicely.

To decorate, I started by piping a heart outline using red stiff icing in a piping bag fitted with a Wilton #2 tip.

Then I filled in the hearts with red runny icing.

After letting them dry overnight, they were done!

Since my youngest son Micah is a Valentine's baby and his second birthday was coming up (he was born the day after Valentine's Day), I decided to turn one of the cookies into a cake topper for his birthday cake, and piped a simple "2" onto one heart cookie.

I can't wait to do this with other cookie shapes as well!

*** Update: click here to see the rainbow fruits birthday cake that I ended up using this cookie topper for!