Pizza Heart Cookies

Valentine's Day....and pizza! What's not to like, right? My children LOVE pizza! So this was a no brainer making them this sweet cookie to make their day special. For years pizza delivery restaurants have long formed their pizzas into hearts for this love filled day. It seemed only natural to me that it should take on cookie form as well. They absolutely adored it and now I am going to share with you how to make this super fun and easy "pizza" my heart so that you can share it with your loved ones.

To begin you will need these tools/items:

Royal Icing

(http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/royal-icing-recipe)

Large heart shaped cookie

(http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sugar-cookies-recipe)

Small amount of DKF - red fondant

Red, yellow, brown, & white food coloring

Piping tips 1-3

Disposable piping bag

Rolling pin

Knife

For your royal icing I always like to start with a thick consistency and water it down to thin it as I need. Your basic flooding that you will use here for this cookie will be about a 10 second flood consistency. Flood consistency has to do with how quickly your icing will smooth out once it has been piped. You don't want it to be too thin or it will run off the cookie (although for this cookie I did that intentionally for that oozing cheesy feel). Too thick and you will have a difficult time piping and your icing will dry too quickly without taking the shape that you may be going for.

Thick consistency royal icing:

Take your prepared cookie dough and roll it out evenly. I used a heart shape I found online and printed it out to serve as a template guide. It is best to work with a chilled cookie dough so that you can handle it easier and the cut will be cleaner. I cut my heart into five pieces since I have five children.

Once your shape is cut out, place the cookie onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Place your tray into the freezer for 10 minutes before baking. Placing your formed cookie dough into the freezer before baking will help your cookie retain its shape and not spread during the baking process.

Use your brown, flood consistency, royal icing to outline a crust on each piece of your heart cookie. By the time you are finishing up outlining you should be able to fill in generously without icing overflowing.

For the next step we will use our red flood icing to make our "pizza sauce". Randomly place blobs of pizza sauce all over each cookie. Allow this to dry before moving on to the next stage...around 30 minutes to an hour so that the red color from your icing will not bleed into the white icing that you will be using next.

Piping your white flood consistency icing all over your pizza slice being carefully to not fully cover all your red sauce that you created before. Allow this time to dry.

While your icing is drying prepare your fondant heart pepperoni. I rolled my fondant out very thin and used one of the piping tips to cut out circles. You can use them just like this or you can cut and form into hearts for a special added touch.

Use your yellow royal icing to pipe lines of cheese onto the white icing you previously piped before.

The last of the "cheese" that we will add needs to be a thicker consistency....about 20 seconds. It will flow but it will be much slower to spread before drying. This gives us the desired "puffy" layered cheese look that we want and makes our pizza look super appetizing. Be sure that your other icing is dry to the touch (very gentle touch...it does not need to be dry all the way through). Cover the majority of the sauce and place your heart pepperoni on your finished cookie pizza!