valentine's cookies - part 1

I had this vision of making darling mini heart cookies for the preschool class Valentine’s Day party. I picked up the little cookie cutter and some mini heart sprinkles. Adorable little red and white striped bags to put them in for each kid…I’m still working on it. Fortunately, the party isn’t until Thursday and I had time to get a test-run in before giving my kids’ classmates something totally inedible.

Do you know how many recipes are out there for “lofthouse-style” sugar cookies? Good grief. I narrowed it down to two recipes…one from I Heart Nap Time and one from The Novice Chef. I chose the first recipe based solely on the fact that it didn’t need to be refrigerated overnight. Then I refrigerated it overnight. The good news is that this is totally ok. Both recipes have some great tips. One tip that I liked from the Nap Time recipe was dusting the saran with powdered sugar prior to refrigerating the dough.

This worked really well. Another tip that turned out to be important, this one from the Novice Chef, had to do with cooking times. The trick to getting these cookies right is to cook them EXACTLY the right amount of time. And I mean exactly. See Exhibit A below.

The cookies will look exactly the same coming out of the oven but as soon as they cool, the undercooked cookies will go flat. And they really don’t taste as good. Trust me, I tasted enough of them. Never fear, there is plenty of dough (I froze half for later) and your kids will eat them either way. Refrigerating the already cut cookies prior to putting them in the oven really seemed to help. And for whatever reason, my batches on parchment came out better than my batches on Silpat. I have no explanation for this. I will keep experimenting.

We never got to making frosting for these cookies over the weekend, but we will make them again on Wednesday, complete with frosting. The Novice Chef says these are better the next day, and I think I might agree. To be continued….Wish us luck.