Buttery Soft Valentine’s Day Cookies with Pomegranate Icing

I love Valentine’s Day. I think it’s the color in the middle of a long, white winter. I also love soft sugar cookies, and though I can never decorate said cookies as I would wish to, I have found a way to create a simple decoration that is pretty and yummy at the same time.

I hope you enjoy this recipe for my buttery soft sugar cookies with pomegranate icing. They are pretty in pink for sure!

Supplies:

• 2 baking sheets
• parchment paper
• mixing bowls
• hand mixer (or a sturdy whisk and a lot of strength)
• pastry brush
• heart-shaped cookie cutter

Ingredients:

Cookies

• 2 and 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 and 1/2 sticks unsalted butter (room temperature or slightly melty from the microwave, if you are like me and can’t seem to plan ahead on the butter)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 large egg
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Icing

• 1 to 1 and 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• pomegranate juice (any dark juice will work and will make different colors)

Directions:

Cookies

Mix dry ingredients in a small mixing bowl. In a larger mixing bowl, mix with your hand mixer the butter and sugar. Make it fluffy. Add the egg, vanilla, and almond extract. Make that fluffy too. Add the dry ingredients and mix everything together thoroughly with your hand mixer. The dough should be a little soft, too soft to work with at this point.

Cover your bowl of dough with a clean dish towel and set aside in a cool area for about half an hour.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

When the dough has stiffened a little, cut it in half, and one a time, roll it out on a floured surface to about 1/3 of inch thick. You want these to be pretty thick cookies. Use your cookie cutter and cut out your hearts. Place on your baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Each time you cut out some cookies, pick up the scraps, pat it back together, and go again with rolling and cutting.

Using a larger cookie cutter, I get 12 to 13 large hearts in total. If you have a smaller cutter, you will get more, of course. Use very bit of your dough. I promise it’s too good to waste. I always fill up two cookie sheets.

Place in the oven and bake for 8 to 11 minutes, depending on the size of your cookie. For the larger cookies, I aim for about 11 minutes. You want to get the cookies out right as they are done–before they start to get browned on the edges.

Icing

While the cookies cool, mix your powdered sugar and just enough pomegranate juice to create a mixture that is fairly thick but thin enough to paint with using your pastry brush. It should be the texture of honey.

Paint your cookies with your pink icing. I like to try to leave an edge, but I also like to paint some all the way over the edge. The variety makes me happy, so do what makes you happy.

Let the cookies sit for about an hour,. The icing will harden. Then, it’s time to enjoy. These go well with a glass of cold milk as well as a cup of warm tea.