Love Heart Cookies

Following my recent hidden heart cupcakes I thought I'd continue with the heart theme with these really sweet love heart cookies. They're easy to make and you can give them to your loved ones as well as your best girlfriends! For those of a more modern disposition, love hearts have also been updated for the 21st century with messages such as 'text me' now included!

Everyone knows love hearts but you may not be aware that you can actually buy anti-love hearts too... so just in case you want to send a different type of message this Valentine's, here's one for you! As for me I'll stick with cutie pie!

To make these you just need a basic cookie dough recipe, check out BBC GoodFood's recipe here. Once you've made and cooled your cookies, make up some royal icing which you can buy in just add water form at the supermarket. Make it relatively stiff to start and use a 1.5 or 2 nozzle to pipe an outline on top of your cookie.

Once the outline has set a little, make your royal icing a little more runny and make up different colours as required. Fill each cookie with the runny icing using small piping bags with the end sniped off, you don't need a nozzle and you can use the end of the bag to push the icing up to your outline. To add little contrasting hearts, immediately drop spots of a different colour into the wet icing and then quickly drag a cocktail stick through each one... et voila... you have hearts!!

Finally, for added embellishment or to write your message, go back to the stiffer icing and mix it up in quite a bright colour and pipe away!! Who knows, as it's a leap year you may even wish to propose to your other half via the medium of cookies!! ;-)