valentine's cookies – part 2

Picture perfect, right? How does she do it? My neighbor called me Martha. Not as in my mother (no offense, Mom), but as in Stewart. It was a banner day for baking in our house. Oh, and it took FOREVER. Seriously, we almost didn’t have dinner. That half of a batch of dough that I froze over the weekend made 90 mini heart cookies. I have no idea what I was thinking taking this on this afternoon.

Seriously though, this is a great recipe. I let the frozen dough defrost in the refrigerator this morning. I mentioned in part 1 of this post that there is definitely a knack to getting the cookies to stay puffy. I decided to test the theory on baking times this time around – I mean, these were destined for preschoolers after all and I figured frosting could cover anything. The recipe I used gave a baking time of 8-9 minutes. Because her cookies seemed quite a bit bigger than mine, I figured my baking time would be shorter. Not so. The first couple of batches were in the oven less than 8 minutes and fell flat. The third batch baked for 8 minutes and retained some of its puffy shape, but definitely was not ideal. Nine minutes turned out to be perfect. I did refrigerate the cut dough on the sheet prior to putting each in the oven and did take the cookies off of the cookie sheet immediately to cool. Oh, and I live at over 5,000 feet.

We did make the frosting this time. We went with the buttercream, which tastes remarkably similar to the store bought pink cookie that we all know and love. It was very simple and really does make the cookies (says a girl who doesn’t actually like frosting). Plus, it was so much fun to watch the kids decorate the cookies. And lick their fingers. Constantly. Just saying, you may want to have a hot wet towel ready to go when you make these with your kids.