Want to wow your friends and family with a cut out butter cookie with style? You will love making and sharing these fancy styled Heart Shaped Butter Cookies! Express your style with piped buttercream swirls, stars and ruffles in assorted hues of pinks from light to fuchsia. Easy piping instructions for every level of decorating experience, beginner to advanced you can decide where you want to take your style. Experiment with double cookies as you can layer baked cookies in mini heart shapes to rounds on top of a solid heart base. You will enjoy baking and decorating these fun festive styled butter cookies.
Why this Butter Cookie Recipe
Not every butter cookie recipe is the same, this recipe is fabulous as what you cut out will be the same size after you bake it, meaning there is no spreading during the bake. Yeah! Such great news as you do not want to invest in the ingredients and time to have cookies that don’t bake right. Right?
So let’s break it down to keep this recipe and cookie dough simple. The basic ingredients are flour, baking powder, and salt for dry ingredients. Real butter, sugar, pure vanilla, not imitation and egg are the liquid ingredients. When these ingredients are combined they form a soft but dense dough perfect for cutting out cookies. However, you will need to chill the dough briefly to firm up the butter for cutting perfect cookie shapes and for baking.
Rolling Out The Dough
An easy way to roll out the dough is between two sheets of parchment paper. This will keep the cookie dough from being too dry with excess flour. Make sure your dough is well chilled before cutting out shapes.
Roll the dough to 1/4″ thickness, chill the dough about 10 minutes before cutting out shapes. After the chill, remove top parchment paper and cut out heart shapes or desired shapes. Remove excess dough re-roll and cut out more cookies. (Keep scrapes of dough for smaller cookies. Repeat until all cookie dough is cut out and chilled.) Return cut out cookies to chill before baking.
Tip: Keep all cookies the same size on one baking sheet for even cooking/time. If you cut out mini shapes place smaller cookie cut outs on a separate baking tray lined with parchment.
Note: this photo below has confectioners sugar that I sometime use to cut out cookies instead of flour without using double parchment paper. Parchment paper is another option when rolling out cookies.
Bake cookies at 375 ° F with oven rack in center of oven. Bake 8-12 minutes depending on size of cookies. Less time for smaller cookies.
Time to Decorate the Cookies
You will need to make Buttercream Frosting and divide frosting evenly in three separate bowls. Tint each bowl with light pink, medium pink and fuchsia or instead of light pink use white or natural frosting. Use food gel for best results.
Gather your supplies, piping tips, couplers and disposable piping bags. Below the diagram showcases the following tips needed and the designs you can make. You do not have to frost the surface of the heart cookies, just pipe your designs. It’s so much fun. You will really enjoy making these. Tip: Practice piping your designs on parchment paper first to get your technique before decorating the surface of the cookie.
The cookies below are double cookies, meaning you have the heart base cookie but to one side or after piping a ruffle design you can add a smaller cookie to the center. Just a different way to decorate. But feel free to make your cookies your own.
Here’s the Recipes for Butter Cookies and Frosting- the printable recipes are below these decorative pages that were featured in the Valentine Issue of All About the Table. To Get the entire Valentine Issue you can go to my shop page where you have the option of digital copy or hard copy.
Fancy Styled Heart Butter Cookies & Frosting
Easy to make, bake and decorate heart shaped butter cookies for Valentine’s Day or any special occasion. Pink, fuchsia and white buttercream frosting, piped in swirls, stars and ruffle designs.
- Prep Time: Cookies_ 20 minutes
- Cook Time: 8-12 minutes
- Total Time: 30 minutes Cookies-Piping 60 minutes
- Yield: 4 dozen- 2″ cookies 1x
- Category: Dessert
- Method: Baking-decorating
- Cuisine: Amercian
Ingredients
Tools Needed: 2-Baking Sheets, parchment paper, disposible piping bags, couplers and tips # 14, 32, 1M, 102, #18. Heart shaped cookie cutters 2-1/2″, 2″, 1″ and mini heart shaped, Baked cookies, Buttercream frosting tinted pink, white, fuchsia or your choice of food gel coloring.
Cookies
3 cups all purpose flour
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder-tested Rumford
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cups butter (2 sticks) Land o Lakes salted
1 teaspoons vanilla
1 cups granulated sugar
Buttercream Frosting
cup butter, room temperature
4 cups confectioners sugar, sifted
2 teaspoon creme bouquet or vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt if needed
Food gel coloring-electric or hot pink, soft pink & white
1 teaspoon raspberry jam- optional flavor for soft pink
Instructions
1.Preheat oven to 375°F. Set aside two baking sheets, line with parchment paper.
2.With a stand mixer cream sugar and butter until fluffy, about 5 minutes. Add egg and flavoring.
3.Mix dry ingredients in separate bowl and add to butter mixture
4.Divide dough in half and place between two sheets of parchment paper to roll into desired thickness, 1/8 to 1/2″. Repeat with the rest of the dough.
5.Put the rolled dough including the parchment paper on a baking sheet and refrigerate for 10 minutes or longer. Your dough will be chilled and ready to cut and bake with no wait and no added flour! Repeat the process with scraps after cutting out cookies. Cut assorted heart shapes, 2-1/2″, 2″, 1″ and mini.
6.Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Let cool on cooling rack.
Buttercream Frosting
1.In stand mixer fitted with paddle attachment cream butter until light in color and blended about 3-5 minutes.
2. Add flavoring, salt and 2 cups confectioner‘s sugar, beat on medium speed to blend, add remaining confectioner‘s sugar, whip on high until fluffy and smooth.
3. Divide frosting evenly and place in three bowls. Add hot pink or electric pink to one, soft pink to second bowl, and white to third. Add raspberry jam to flavor soft pink if desired.
4. Fit 4 disposable piping bags with coupler and tips #74, 32, 102, & 18. Cut one disposable bag end off and fit #1M without a coupler. 102 ruffle, 18 small star, 32 medium star, 1M large swirl, 74 small swirl.
5. Divide the soft pink frosting in two bags, white frosting in 2 bags and electric pink/hot pink in 1 M piping bag. Now you are ready to decorate your cookies with 1 M swirls first, then fill in with smaller swirls & stars. Sprinkle with white non pareils. Have fun decorating!
Notes
Cookie Recipe makes 4 dozen- 2″ heart cookies will depend on size of cutters you use.
Buttercream frosting recipe can be doubled or tripled for piping needs.
More Ideas You Might Like to Try:
Valentine Table Scape
