Rainbow heart cookies DIY

I had been feeling slightly restless and unproductive the whole day. At one point I decided that I had had enough of it. I wanted to fight my apathy by just making something. Anything. So I decided to bake some cookies. Even better, I decided to make heart-shaped rainbow cookies. Sometimes all you need is a plan that involves good food and bright colours.

I am not going into the baking process of the cookies, because this post is more about the rainbow icing than the cookies themselves. I think any basic cookie recipe will do. I used a recipe I got from my friend Anne (recipe in Dutch). I will however explain the icing process in more detail, because in the past I used to make icing by adding water to powdered sugar. This resulted in flooded cookies. So I will share a way to put some boundaries to your icing. You will need to make royal icing to do so (doesn’t that sound fancy?).

Ingredients for royal icing:
1 egg white
125 gram of powdered sugar
0.5 tablespoon of lemon juice

Whisk the egg white, until it becomes a thick mass. Then add the powdered sugar and lemon juice and mix it together until it becomes a shiny white thick consistency that ‘sticks’ to your spoon or mixer. I would recommend only adding little bits of each ingredient together at a time though, so you can adjust the thickness of your icing according to your wishes.
 

I bet there are fancy tools for applying icing to your cookies, but I found that regular cling film does the trick pretty well. Just cut off a piece and apply the icing in the middle. You probably won’t need all of the icing, so just use whatever you think is a fair amount. You can store the rest of the icing in the fridge (covered). Then fold the outer corners of the plastic foil up so you have a ball of icing in plastic. You can now just pinch a hole in the plastic with any sharp object. You will be able to draw lines of icing by squeezing into the ball, for example to outline your cookies.



After outlining your cookies, you can draw lines that will later on separate the colors. I used 6 colors, so added 5 lines to each cookie. Let the icing dry after this step until it has hardened.



To make running icing you can simply add (very little) water to your royal icing until it flows. Or you could use powdered sugar and water. Divide the icing into different bowls and add food coloring. Then fill up the spaces between the lines with pretty, bright colors. You could ‘help’ your icing to get into the tiny, difficult spaces by using a toothpick.
   

When you filled up all the spaces between the lines with beautiful and happy colours, let the cookies dry sufficiently. The running icing can take a while to harden (I let them dry over night). Then, attack ☺

Also, this post triggered me to add the label ‘rainbow’ to my tag cloud, because rainbows do seem to be a reoccurring theme around here. Sometimes I wonder what this says about me. For example I have an entire label dedicated to ‘imaginary friends’, which you know, makes you think. Sometimes I imagine that one day in the future they will say that they 'should have seen the signs'…