Valentine’s Day Love Bird Cookies

I recently showed y’all how to marble your cookie dough, and ended up with about 4 dozen heart-shaped pink and white cookies as a result. So I put on my thinking cap and decided that I’d decorate them in a suitably romantic theme, in honor of the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday! So while the dough in this post is pink and white, it’s not a requirement of the recipe. You can use whatever color(s) you like!

Something really fun about this design is that it’s actually much more versatile than you might think. While I kept with the pink and white theme for Valentine’s Day, you can change these birds so whatever colors you need to fit your event. Pink and blue birds for a gender reveal party, black and white for a wedding shower, and so on! Any event with a focus on love is fair game. Make one Tom Brady and the other Rob Gronkowski, if that’s what floats your boat!

The design is actually really simple. The first time I saw it, I knew it would be a good one to feature here because it only takes a few colors and a couple hours time to complete. You shouldn’t need to trace anything, stencil anything, or paint anything. This one is straight free hand royal icing. Don’t be intimidated, you can do it! Once you check out the steps, I’m sure you’ll feel as confident that your cookies are about to… fly to new heights? Forgive the pun, I couldn’t resist! Let’s get going!

For clarity, I’ll assume you are making the same colored birds as I did in these photos. You should start by baking up a batch of heart shaped cookies following my standard cookie recipe. (I’ve also included that recipe at the bottom of this post for your convenience.) While your cookies cool, you should make your royal icing. Split your first batch of icing between your two bird colors- so half of the icing pink, and the other half of it white. You should reserve about 1/3 of each of the icing colors in bags at piping consistency, and then thin and bottle the rest at flooding consistency. You should also make brown, orange, and black icing in at piping consistency and set them aside for later.

You want to divide your heart in half almost like a yin-yang symbol, piping and filling the larger shape first. Allow the pink half of the heart to dry for at least 20 minutes before piping and filling the smaller, white half of the heart in white. Hang on to your pink and white piping bags for later!

Now your cookies need time to set up and dry for about an hour. You can generally cut most drying times in half if you have a counter top fan pointed at your cookies, which is something I highly recommend! Once you’re ready, you can begin the detail work. Do this by piping a brown line across the bottom one third of your cookie (I used a #2 tip for this) and then halfway back across. End the line by pulling it downward a bit to create a smaller ‘branch’ detail. While your branch dries, you can make the love birds’ eyes, beaks, and feet. I used a #1 tip for these details.

To make the beaks, you should pipe an upside down triangle for the smaller white bird, and half a circle with another small upside down triangle under it for the pink bird. To make the feet, use the orange icing again. Draw four pairs of small lines on the branch, with a bit of extra space between the two sets so it’s clear they belong to two different birds.

Now pipe in the wings- the white bird has a wing almost like a cursive capital ‘E’ that is drawn upward at the end, and the pink bird’s wing is like a zig-zag on the leftmost edge of the design.

That’s it! Allow the cookies to dry on the counter overnight before bagging or boxing. Make sure to let me know if you have any questions or thoughts in the comments!

Foolproof Sugar Cookies

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Prep Time 20 minutes mins

Cook Time 10 minutes mins

Total Time 30 minutes mins

Ingredients

  

• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup butter
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 egg

Instructions

 

• Preheat oven to 350. 
• In bowl, mix together 3 cups of the flour and baking power. Set aside.
• In separate bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Add in the extracts and the egg and beat until combined.
• Slowly add the flour mixture to the butter mixture. Dough will be crumbly.
• Press dough together with hands, and roll out on a well-floured surface. Cut shapes and place on a baking sheet covered in parchment paper.
• Refrigerate baking sheet for at least 10 minutes.
• Bake for 9-11 minutes, remove when cookie edges are just barely golden. Allow several minutes to cool on sheet before moving cookies to a rack.