Red Velvet Heart Cookies

Jan 31

Some time ago, on a Facebook baking group, I saw someone post a picture of all the goodies she was going to sell around Valentine’s Day. Among those goodies I noticed a treat that looked an awful lot like those peanut butter blossom cookies that everyone makes at Christmas, but it was a red crackled cookie that made the base instead of a generic peanut butter dough. I thought that they looked fantastic as a treat for the holiday of hearts, and I set myself the task of writing a recipe for these awesome looking treats. I decided to make the base of the cookie taste like red velvet rather than just dying a regular cookie dough red. I also found inspiration while looking around the grocery store for chocolate kisses and found chocolate hearts instead. Thus these red velvet chocolate heart cookies were born. They were an instant winner for me and I hope they’ll be for you too!

One of the first steps of this recipe is to make, what I like to call, red velvet paste. This is a mixture of equal parts liquid red food coloring and cocoa powder. I got this trick from America’s Test Kitchen. Their recipe for red velvet cake uses this technique to get the perfect deep red color associated with this most awesome of cakes. I found it works equally well in this recipe.

As with most recipes you make a dry mix and a wet mix. The dry mix is basic consisting of flour, salt and baking powder. The wet mix, is a little more special. Instead of using straight butter for the fat in this recipe, I decided to substitute some of the butter for cream cheese. Cream cheese frosting is the most traditional topping for red velvet cake. In fact, it is my opinion that this is one of the key things that makes this cake special. Therefore leaving the cream cheese out of this recipe would have been a travesty. A word on procedure. In the video that accompanies this recipe, you’ll see me take my time over the wet ingredients, mixing first the butter, cream cheese and sugar and then adding the rest. In this picture (which was taken some time ago, I’m sorry to say) I mix them all at once. Suffice it to say that over time I improved my technique and though this makes a pretty picture, doing the mixing in steps really does make a better product. So follow the recipe and the video, and try not to think too hard about the picture you see below.

You are now left with three mixtures: the wet ingredients, the red velvet paste, and the dry ingredients. It is now time to bring them all together. I do this mixing by hand for the most part. You can use a mixer and things will turn out fine, but I always worry about overmixing. I always feel that my baked goods turn out better when I do what I can with elbow grease rather than electricity. However, you do what you feel is best, but at the same time DON’T OVERMIX!!

If you’re using properly softened butter and cream cheese, you’ll have a very loose cookie dough at this point. This means that the dough will have to be chilled before you can roll out the cookies into balls. If you plan on portioning out the balls after chilling then the dough will need to be refrigerated for at least an hour. I have, being an impatient person, found a work-around, however. If you have a cookie scoop at home, you can portion out the dough first, then chill the balls. This will allow the dough to chill in about 15-20 minutes rather than an hour.

After chilling comes the fun part. These cookie dough balls need to be rolled in powdered sugar. This is a trick I learned a long time ago to get a cracked finish to your cookies. The sugar sets on the surface of the dough, and when the cookies start to spread in the oven, the sugar cracks and forms that really awesome finish. I like to put my powdered sugar into a large bowl or storage container. This way I can roll multiple cookies at once by placing them in the sugar and rolling them around in the container. These cookies do spread, so you’ll only be able to fit 12 on a standard baking tray. This means you’ll have to do 3 trays worth per batch.

After the cookies are baked, you can add on the chocolate. Who wants a Valentine’s treat without chocolate? Make sure to unwrap the hearts before you bakes so that they’re ready to press in as soon as the cookies come out of the oven. You need to do this while the cookies are hot so that the chocolate will set firmly into the cookies upon cooling. Because of the fact that we want the chocolate to melt, however, we need to make sure not to move the cookies until the chocolate resets. I have learned from hard experience that failing to do so results in chocolate hearts that look more like…..well, something else. Again, being impatient, I often find myself carefully moving my cooling rack into the refrigerator for a half an hour to make the process go faster.

The finished product of these cookies is so impressive. Their texture is soft and yet chewy. Their flavor is uniquely red-velvet, and gives one the experience of dipping a slice of said delicious cake into chocolate. Not that I’ve done that before, but it’s on my bucket list. I truly hope that you’ll try these cookies out and give them out to your loved ones this Valentine’s Day. I know they’ll be impressed and you’ll go down as one of the best Valentine’s gift givers in history. (No, you’re exaggerating)

Remember you don’t have to be a professional to make magic in the kitchen.

Joe the Blue Wizard.