Buttercream Frosted Heart Shaped Cookies

The prettiest heart shaped cutout cookies for Valentine’s day, simply decorated with buttercream and a small star piping tip. Also included in today’s post is a video to demonstrate a few of the techniques I used for decorating these frosted Valentine’s cookies.

You might also love these red and white Valentine linzer cookies, heart shaped chocolate bundt cake, and red and white striped heart cookies.

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Equipment and Ingredients

• Food Processor or Pastry Cutter. For making the cookie dough. See this recipe post for a helpful video on making the dough.
• Stand Mixer with Paddle Attachment. For making the buttercream. This buttercream recipe post includes a video, and all the information you need for making perfectly pipeable buttercream.
• 12-Inch Disposable Piping Bags + Couplers (plus small star tips, such as #18).
• Rolling Pin and Cookie Cutters. I like to use a variety of cookie cutters for a project like this, so I used several different sizes and styles of heart shaped cutters for my heart shaped Valentine’s cookies.
• 1 recipe Vanilla Cutout Cookies. To add more flavor, I added fresh orange zest and ground cardamom to the dough. You could flavor them with lemon zest instead.
• 2x recipe Perfect American Buttercream
• Gel Food Coloring (“super red” and “warm brown”)

Instructions

Cookie Dough

• Make the cookie dough for the vanilla cutout cookies as instructed. I also flavored my dough with the one tsp freshly grated orange zest and 1/2 tsp ground cardamom to add more flavor, but this is optional. You can flavor the dough however you like. (The link for the dough recipe also includes a helpful video for making the dough.)
• Wrap the dough and chill for 20 minutes before rolling and cutting the cookies.

Cut the Cookies

• On a clean, floured surface, roll out the dough to just under 1/4 inch thick.
• Use a variety of heart-shaped cookie cutters to cut as many cookies as you can. Gather up the scraps, roll them out again, and continue to cut cookies until you’ve used up the dough.
• Place the cut cookies on parchment-lined baking sheets. Set the baking sheets in the refrigerator to chill the cut cookies for at least 30 minutes before baking.

Bake the Cookies

• Preheat the oven to 350 F, and position a rack in the center of the oven.
• Bake the cookies, one baking sheet at a time, for 12 minutes. Cool for several minutes on the baking sheet, then carefully transfer the cookies to a cooling rack to cool completely. Handle the baked cookies gently.

Make the Buttercream

• Make 2x the recipe for American buttercream.
• Divide the buttercream between four bowls. Keep one bowl of buttercream white, and tint the other three in various shades of light, medium and dark pink, using the “super red” gel food coloring. I also like to add a few drops of “warm brown”, which gives the pink color a richer hue.

Decorating

• Fit your piping bags with couplers and small star tips – I used tip #18. Fill the piping bags with the buttercream.
• Decorate the cooled cookies – see the video for ideas and techniques.

Be sure to read all of my BAKING FAQs where I discuss ingredients, substitutions and common baking questions, so that you can be successful in your own baking!

Frequently Asked Questions

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