3 EASY Valentine Cookie Decorating Ideas

Step 1: Make Dough, Cut Shapes, and Bake

After following the instructions on how to make classic sugar cookies, your cookie dough is ready to be rolled out. I highly recommend checking out my guide on how to perfectly roll-out sugar cookie dough.

Now, it's just to cut them out into the shapes you like!

• Heart Cookie: use a heart shaped cookie cutter
• Circle Heart: use a circle cookie cutter or glass cup to cut out shapes
• Envelope: roll out dough and then use a sharp knife cut into rectangles (you can also just bake my sugar cookie bars)

Tip: Want to make the dough ahead of time and roll it out later? Learn all about how to freeze sugar cookie dough.

Step 2: Make & Color Buttercream Frosting

I used my easy sugar cookie buttercream frosting recipe as the base for all 3 colors and simply mixed in the exact amount of food coloring to get the perfect shade!

To Make Red Frosting: For every 1 cup of frosting, use 4 drops Wilton Crimson + 2 drops Wilton Red.

To Make Pink Frosting: For every 1 cup of frosting, use 1 toothpick swipe of Wilton Red (dip the tip of a toothpick ½″ into the food coloring then swipe on top of the frosting). The toothpick trick is the easiest way to pale, light pink frosting!

Tip: If you want your frosting to be pure white, use clear extracts (using brown vanilla extract will make the frosting slightly off-white!).

Step 3: Decorate!

To make it as easy as possible, I am going to share how I decorated each cookie design and any tips I may have.

Idea 1: Heart Cookie:

Out of all the Valentine cookie decorating ideas, these heart cookies are the easiest to decorate!

1. Cut out heart cookies using a cookie cutter, bake, and cool.
2. Using a piping piping bag and small round tip (#5), start out by piping along the edge of the cookie.
3. Then, use a zig-zag motion to fill the center of the cookie.
4. You can leave it like this, OR you can use an offset spatula to smooth it all out.

Tip: You can leave the cookie as is, or you can decorate it with some pink sugar sprinkles. This frosting hardens quickly, so be sure to add sprinkles immediately after frosting!

Idea 2: Envelope Cookie:

You'll use the rectangle cookies for this one! You can easy any of the colored buttercream frostings for this one but I went ahead and used plain white.

1. Cut out rectangle cookies using a knife, bake, and cool.
2. Pipe or spread the buttercream evenly onto the cookie (if piping, create an outline, fill in, then smooth).
3. Pipe out the outline of an envelope shape (shown in the picture below) by piping a border, followed by a triangle on the top and two lines on the bottom.
4. Seal the "envelope" with a jumbo heart-shaped sprinkle.

Tip: If you can't find any heart-shaped sprinkles, you can simply pipe one on with red frosting or swap them out and use a classic Valentine's Day candy conversation heart!

Idea 3: Circle With Heart:

Now, for the last cookie! This is my favorite circle Valentine cookie, as you can make it with a simple circle cup!

1. Cut out circle cookies using a glass cup or circle cookie cutter, bake, and cool.
2. Pread or pipe on the white icing.
3. If you have it, lightly press a small heart cookie cutter into the center of the cookie to leave a heart outline.
4. Now using the red piping bag and small round tip (#5), pipe along the heart outline and fill the center.

Tip: Don't have a heart-shaped cookie cutter? You can simply freehand the heart shape!