Engagement Cookies {How-To}

Thank you to all the awesome people who have commented, emailed, tweeted and otherwise complimented me on the treats I made for my sister’s engagement party. I put so many countless hours of work, about 20 pounds of flour, bags and bags of sugar of all varieties, and finally pulled it all off. I just showed you folks the various goodies I made for the party, but I saved the best for the last. The center of the middle table had these:

From a glance, they might simply look like wooden branches in really cool vases. But look close and you can see there are delicious little flowers sprouting from the branches.

You know how they saw money doesn’t grow on trees? Well here’s something super important to remember: sadly, neither do cookies. I would totally plant a forest of cookie trees if that were a possibility. Because cookie producing trees don’t exist, I am going to show you how to make these cookies yourself. They’re really pretty, and totally perfect for an engagement, wedding shower, or even a wedding.

Let’s start, shall we?

First, you are going to need a recipe of your favorite decorator’s sugar cookies. Here’s Mine. You’ll be needing a batch of royal icing too, which is on that link.

Here’s what else you will need:

• Two different colors of food coloring (that look nice together)
• Heart shaped cookie cutter (your choice of sizes, I used a fairly small one)
• A drinking straw
• 3 piping bags
• 2 couplers
• Wilton #2 tip
• Wilton #1 tip
• plastic squeeze bottle
• ribbon

Next, flood the cookie: (Here’s where you’ll use the handy-dandy squeeze bottle.)

Now do that a ton of times:

And then, when you feel like you are up to your ears in royal icing, make a whole ton more:

Or, you could be a little less insane than I was and do fewer than 120 cookies. Just a suggestion.

Let the cookies harden completely. I waited overnight. You should to, or you might risk the colors flooding like they did on my clown cookie pops.

Use the reserved white icing (or you can use the other color for this) to pipe the initials of the happy couple- one per color. If your cookie is small (like mine) use a #1 tip for this. If it’s big, you can go for a #2. Or try both and see which you like better.

Don’t make my mistake. After piping S onto 60 pink cookies, I moved over to the green side of the table and began to pipe…more S’s! I was about five in when I realized my mistake, and luckily they were all still wet enough to wipe off and re-pipe an E. All’s well that ends in cookies, right?

When you are done, if you aren’t totally sick of piping yet, or it’s only 2 am and you don’t have to be up for work until 6:30 am the next day, or you have more icing and don’t want it to go to waste, or all of the above, you can pipe an outline of white or the other color around the heart. Or you can pipe dots. Or some of each. Go crazy. Have fun.

Once the icing has completely hardened, tie one of each color together with a ribbon and tie a nice little bow.

Now display them at the party and pretend to be all humble about it while everyone gushes over your work.

Enjoy! I hope you like these. And I hope you come back soon, because I have some really delicious recipes to share with you guys. -Miriam

By the way, did you know that I am on Twitter? And on Facebook? And on Pinterest? And on Google+? Are you there too? Let’s connect!