Link from Pinterest: http://www.laurenslatest.com/slice-n-bake-valentine-heart-cookies/

These cookies look like the pre-sliced cookies you can by for any holiday, but the experience of making them made me appreciate them even more! Combining the hearts and the surrounding plain dough was really hard. The cookies only bake for 10 minutes, but they have to chill for at least an hour, so it is important to have enough time!

Ingredients:

3 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup sugar

2 sticks butter of cold butter, cut into 8ths

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

red food coloring

Tools:

2 Bowls

Teaspoon

Mixer

Saran wrap

Parchment Paper

Pan

Knife, spoon

Heart-shaped cookie cutter

Instructions

Instructions

1. Combine flour and baking powder in a bowl.

• The step is totally necessary! If you do not add the powders separately, the cookie texture will be all out of whack.

2. Mix sugar and butter. Then, add the egg and vanilla.

• Make sure to scrape the edge before moving on to the next step so that the butter is completely mixed in with the egg.

3. Slowly add flour mixture to the creamed ingredients.

• This is vital because if you add all the flour at once, the powder flies out and all over. It makes for a very messy kitchen, and then you lose that excess flour.

4. Separate ⅔ of the dough in a bowl, and use remaining ⅓ with red food coloring to make a solid color.

• I used gel food coloring, and used mostly pink with a hint of red, however you can use the 1 ½ teaspoons of liquid food coloring.

5. Roll out red dough and use the cookie cutter to punch many hearts. Then, stack the hearts.

• This step was way harder than it seems. The flour I used to make the dough not stick the rolling pin made the dough hearts not stick to each other. I had to stack the hearts, then smush them together so I could surround them.

6. Use the regular dough to surround the red heart stacks, then saran wrap them and refrigerate for at least an hour.

• The recipe suggests making tiny rolls, and the using many of them to surround the whole edge of the hearts, but when I tried this method, the did not stick to the edge of the hearts. I ended up using a long, thin sheet of plain dough and rolling up the red heart stack with it.

7. Cut the refrigerated dough into slices, and bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes, or until the bottoms are golden.

• I had to bake mine for closer to 12 minutes to get the bottoms to look golden, and I thought it was the perfect amount of time to have a soft, but well cooked, cookie.