I don’t have much planned for Valentine’s Day this year. Usually we avoid restaurants – too crowded and usually overpriced. If we do anything, we cook a nice dinner at home and I might make some special dessert. I made this raspberry cobbler with dark chocolate biscuits a few weeks ago and pretty much can’t stop thinking about it so that may be happening again. But I also wanted to do something fun for the kids. I had some sugar cookie dough already made in the fridge, so I decided to make some miniature XOXO cookies. I didn’t feel like messing with any sort of detailed icing design, so I just went with a simple royal icing, no edging or flooding, and sprinkled some with sparkling sugar. Andrew walked past as the cookies were sitting on the cooling rack and exclaimed, “Cool! Tic tac toe cookies!” Well, that idea was just too fun to pass up.
I used a set of mini Valentine cutters made by Wilton. I found my set at Joann’s. If your craft store doesn’t have this particular set, they should have small alphabet and heart cutters for fondant that would work too. Or you could simply use a small round cutter to make circles and then add the X’s and O’s yourself. Obviously, you could easily draw a grid or print one out, but I saw a roll of washi tape sitting on my desk and decided to make use of it. For the royal icing, I made a consistency somewhere between what I normally use for edging and for flooding, so that it would not overflow but would still flow together, if that makes sense. It made for very quick and easy decorating. This set up was a hit with the kids, even if Caroline is still a bit too young to fully understand the concept of tic tac toe. If you have kids, this is a fun Valentine activity that doubles as dessert!
