You need:
- 200 gr plain flour
- 100 gr sugar
- 100 gr butter (room temperature)
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
- a teaspoon of baking powered
- a pinch of salt
And for the icing:
-250 gr icing sugar
- 2-3 table spoons of boiling water
- red colouring paste
Preheat the oven at 180 degrees.
Beat the butter and sugar until they get a pale yellow colour. Add the eggs, then the vanilla. Finally mix the flout, baking power and salt and add it to the mixture. You can do this all in a food processor. Wrap the cookie dough in cling film and let it rest in the fridge for a couple of hours.
Put the mixture over a large rectangle of cling film. Cover it with another large rectangle and roll it until you get a pound-like thickness. Cut the cookies with a heart shape cutter and put them on a baking tray covered with a silicon mat or baking paper. Cook them for 13-14 minutes (you may meed to cook them in two batches). Get the cookies out of the oven and put them on a cooling rack so that they get cold before you ice them (this takes 10 minutes more or less)
For the icing: sift the icing sugar and add the water (a little bit each time) until you get a thick glossy paste. Do not make it too liquid. Add the red colouring, while reserving a bit of the white mixture for decorations. Cover the cookies with the red colouring using a spatula. Then put the white icing into a piping bag with a small nose and decorate the cookies. As you can see in the picture my sons do not have steady hands for decoration and mine are not any better (I did the white decorations with mixed results…) but that did not stop our friends eating them.
Needless to say you can use this recipe for any other kind of shape, colours, etc…
