valentine's day cut out cookies with marbled frosting

if you obsessively follow baking trends online like i do, i'm sure you know that really beautiful & elegant cutout cookies have been making the rounds for valentine's day. the general consensus on these cookies are that they are painstakingly difficult, specifically the icing, so of course i needed to give them a try.

to be honest with you all, i didn't think these were going to be successful at all and i went into the project with the notion that this batch would be my pre-documentation test run. i was happily mistaken and i think these, by and large, came out pretty well. 

i wanted to make sure that these cookies didn't just look pretty, but that they tasted great too. i spent a lot of time researching and adjusting recipes to come up with one that was delicious and that baked flat and evenly enough to ice. 

this batch of around two dozen took me, all together, around six hours to make. the icings are all hand-tinted with gel colors and each of the cookies had to be dammed, filled, and the marbled. needless to say, this is not an every-day cookie. but, for someone whose ideal saturday morning is staying in her pajamas, sipping iced coffee, listening to npr and decorating twenty four cookies by hand it was wonderful. plus, i think the results are pretty impressive.

there's no recipe this time around, mostly because i'm still tweaking and i want to have photographs to go along with the instructions.

to aid in forgiveness, i will divulge that tomorrow i'm making vegan funfetti cupcakes from scratch, so please come on back!

amanda