Colored Dough Heart Cookies

If you’ve never made cookies using colored dough before, you’re missing out. It’s super easy to do and if you’re not in the mood to decorate with icing, you still have pretty cookies! Today I’m going to share with your how I made these cute little heart cookies. They’re pretty enough to be the main event but they also make a great accent piece for a platter of cookies or other sweets.

Table of Contents

Supplies for Colored Dough Heart Cookies

To make colored dough heart cookies you will need:

Cookie dough made from your favorite sugar cookie recipe
Heart cookie cutters
Red gel food coloring
Royal icing made from your favorite royal icing recipe
Wilton teal and Americolor electric blue gel food coloring
White sanding sugar
#2 piping tip

How To Create Colored Dough for Heart Cookies

Seperate out the dough that you want to color pink. For a pink salmon color, add a little red gel food coloring and knead the dough until you have an even color. (Learn from my mistakes… wear gloves for this part!) For a brighter pink color, like my Multi-Colored Cookie Press Flowers, I suggest Wilton gel food coloring in rose.Once you have colored your dough, roll it out, cut it using your heart cookie cutters, and bake according to the directions for your favorite sugar cookie recipe.

How To Decorate Colored Dough Heart Cookies

If you want to keep your colored dough heart cookies simple, I suggest dusting them with rainbow disco dust. I did this on my Cupcake Cookies with Heart Centers and it gave the cookies a pretty sparkly effect.

If you really want to make your cookies pop, I suggest decorating them with royal icing in a bright contrasting color. I used a combination of Wilton teal and Americolor electric blue. I used 12-count consistency icing and a #2 piping tip to decorate my heart cookies.

To test the consistency of your icing, slice a knife into the surface of the icing and count how long it takes the icing to fill back in and create a smooth surface. For 12-count consistency icing, you should be able to count “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…” to 12. Add water to the icing a tiny bit at a time until you reach your desired consistency. For more information about coloring icing and how to use the different consistencies of royal icing, see the How To Make Royal Icing section of 101 Essential Cookie Decorating Resources.

Pipe different designs onto your heart cookies using royal icing. Then, while the icing is still wet, sprinkle white sanding sugar onto the surface. Shake off any excess sugar and set the cookies aside to dry completely (preferably overnight) before stacking or packaging your colored dough heart cookies.

If you don’t want your colored dough heart cookies to get lonely, make them a part of a platter like I did with my Alton Brown’s Cocoa Brownies for Ovarian Cancer Awareness.