Valentine Heart Sugar Cookies - Part 3

OK, I'm back with the third and final post about my valentines sugar cookies - if you missed them, Part 1 was the recipe and instructions for making the cookies, Part 2 was about icing basics and piped designs, and Part 3 (today) will be about how to make these cool marbled/swirly types of cookies.  I forget where I originally saw about making these types of cookies, but I have tried them before and really liked how they turned out.  A lot of the ideas for valentines cookies with this technique came from this post - and there are a lot more ideas there that I didn't try, so check it out if you like this kind of decoration.

I tried making three different basic designs with this technique - an overall marbled design, scattered hearts, and a heart border.  I had a hard time getting the scattered hearts to turn out well, I think because my icing was a bit too far on the runny side, but the other two sides turned out well.  For all of these designs, you basically just pipe the wet flood icing in a design - either dots or lines for the ones I did - on top of the still wet cookie icing, and then draw a toothpick through it to create the marbled/feathered look.

In addition to have the right consistency icing, I found that it helps a lot of there is enough contrast between the base icing color and the piped color.  The designs were harder to see on some of the light pink on white cookies that I made.

These heart border ones look really cute and aren't hard to make at all!  You just pipe evenly spaced dots around the border and then draw the toothpick through the middles all the way around the border.

Thanks for reading!  I am still planning to try out royal icing to compare to my normal icing recipe so I will report back on how that goes.  Are you making any special treats for valentines day?