Valentines' is coming up.
Let's be honest: it's just a marketing-trick nowadays, no-one is expecting love-letters from secret admirers any more.
Nevertheless it worked on me: I very much felt called upon to create something sweet and heart-shaped.

These are the multi-coloured cookies I made for T:
(more for myself, actually, since I am the sweet-tooth in this household)


Although I did feel I was kneading huge bubblegum-balls a lot of the time, I really enjoyed baking these cookies.

And here's how you do it:

I used a basic recipe for shortbread-cookies and added some red food-colouring.
These are the basic ingredients for the cookie-dough:
Beside this, you'll need:
- Fondant (I used a bar of 250g)
- Additional food colouring and perhaps -flavouring (for the fondant)
- Latex gloves (not the powdery ones)
- Cling-film
- A rolling pin
- Cookie-cutters (larger round ones for the cookie-dough, smaller ones for the fondant)
- Baking paper (and an oven, obviously)
- A bit of powdered sugar (and water)
- A small brush

First off, two tips:
1. Don't work with cookie-dough when hungry, or you'll end up with only half the cookies you planned to bake and a slightly upset stomach.
2. when using food-colouring ALWAYS USE GLOVES. No kidding. The colouring will get under your nails and soak into your skin. Not pretty.

THE STEPS:

1> You probably know the drill: knead the (cold) butter through the flower and add sugar and salt. I added the food-colouring to the finished dough, as kneading with latex gloves that are several sizes too big is not easy pretty annoying.

2> Once the dough is evenly coloured, wrap it in cling-film and have it rest in the refrigerator for a bit.


3> After about 45 minutes, take out the gigantic pink ball of bubblegum cookie-dough, and cut out the cookies with a simple round cutter.

While you're doing this, pre-heat the oven at 180 degrees celsius.
The whole experience of cutting cookies out of bright pink dough is somewhat discomforting, but if you try eating a bit of the dough, you'll notice it tastes just as regular cookie-dough does.
Tasted it? Al right. Now STOP EATING THE DOUGH and make cookies out of it.

4> While the cookies are in the oven (for approximately 20 minutes), you'll have time to work on the fondant.

5> Preparing the fondant: I used a 250g white fondant bar, of which I coloured half with blue and green food-colouring, while I added a bit of orange-flavouring to the rest (again, using gloves - also, don't overdo the flavouring, a few drops will do the trick).

Note that the cookie-cutters I used to cut out the shapes of the hearts and stars are slightly smaller than the one I used for the cookies. 



6> After taking the cookies out of the oven, give them time to cool off before the next step: Adding the fondant.

7> To 'glue' the fondant to the cookies I used a little bit of icing that I made by mixing powdered sugar with a few drops of water.

Use a little brush to apply the icing on one side of the fondant, and gently place the the heart or star on the cookie.



8> You can now choose to leave the fondanted cookies as they are, or you can do as I did and add some proverbial spice by stamping words, kisses and initials into the fondant.

And.... there you go:

Sweets for my Sweet!

Now don't go eating the whole batch in one go, there's enough sugar in there to keep you going for a week.