Muah cookies

Care for a kiss?

Long time no see and yes, it's all my fault. One of these days I'm gonna give myself a shelling over how I've been so irregular with my blog. For those of you who are still around, I am coming up with a project on the blog that will have me blogging more regularly and more importantly, share with you'll some great recipes/designs. So stay tuned and once again, I am so sorry for the long absence. I only hope the adage absence makes the heart fonder applies here :p  But for now, I am making up for that with a step by step tutorial of a cookie design that I fell in love with the minute I saw it. Valentine's Day is around the corner and I don't know about you, but I like cheeky ones rather than sappy valentines and this one has cheeky 'smacked' all over it. It's such a simple design that even someone with no cookie decorating experience can do it with ease and that's why this is the first tutorial of the year. Simple and fabulous, this one's a keeper and I take no credit to the design. Sweetambs is the original creator of this design (as far as I know) and I followed suit and I hope you do too.. 

For this project you'll need - 

• Cookie dough (You can use shortbread or sugar cookie dough for this). Here are some popular links for both - here and here. 
• A heart shaped cookie cutter.
• Or go and buy a ready-made heart shaped cookie  if you are feeling lazy and use that.
• Royal icing (in flood consistency/ten second consistency) - you can find my recipe and details here.
• Red food colour (gel or powder based).
• A toothpick, scribe tool or a long blunt needle.
• Piping bags/parchment piping cones or just a ziplock.

Method:

• Roll out your cookie dough and cut out hearts with your cutter.
• Chill them for about ten minutes in the fridge.
• Bake the cookies at 180 C for about ten minutes till the sides are slightly browned.
• Prepare your icing and colour one portion of it red (you can use as much as you need depending on how many cookies you will be icing).
• Take 2 piping bags/parchment cones/ziplock bags and fill one with the white (un-coloured icing) and the other with the red.

Decorating:

Take your piping bag filled with white icing, snip off the end to make a tiny hole and pipe an outline and then flood/fill in the cookie completely with the white icing like in the picture below.

Step 1: Outline the cookie. Step 2: Flood/fill the cookie

Before this dries, fill another piping bag/ziplock bag with red icing and pipe ovals onto the cookie in random areas. Once the ovals are piped, take your toothpick and starting from the center of the oval, drag a line outwards, to the corners, on both sides, like shown in the pictures below.

Step 3: Pipe ovals. Step 4: Drag your toothpick starting from the center of the oval to the corners.

Clean the toothpick/needle/scribe tool and start from a few millimeters above the oval and drag a line down to form the pout. Follow this for all the ovals and there, you go, your muah cookies are ready. Didn't I tell you they were super simple?

Step 5: Drag a line down the oval to create the pout

Shake the cookie a bit to even out the icing and leave to dry for about 12 to 24 hours depending on the humidity of your area.

Note:

• Make sure your cookies are dry and have a gap of at least a few hours after baking before you ice them, otherwise the butter in the cookies will seep out and not let your icing have the desired effect.
• Before you ice the cookie, keep all your icing in piping bags/ziplocks and keep all that you need handy as the icing starts to set and all the processes are to be done in succession. As you can see in the picture above, it had already begun to set since I was taking breaks between each step to take pictures.
• The icing might look a bit bumpy soon after piping and swirling it. Just hold the cookie gently by the corners, taking care not to smush the icing and shake it till the icing settles.
• Leave in a dry place, uncovered, to set. Do not place the iced cookies in the fridge to set. 

That's about it. Do let me know how your attempts go and be free to drop in your comments/queries and I shall get back to you. And yes, please do share pictures of your muah cookies.

Till next time, what are you waiting for? Get, Set, Bake!!!