Use these little cookie sandwiches to send a big message this Valentine’s Day. They are made with a hint of peanut butter for an extra added touch and filled with a layer of raspberry in between. All you need to get started is a 4-inch wide heart-shaped cookie cutter and some miniature alphabet cookie cutters and you’ll be on your way.

Sweetheart Cookies
Yields: 24 individual hearts or 12 cookie sandwiches

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla
Raspberry filling or jam
Powdered sugar
Parchment paper
Rolling pin
4-inch wide heart-shaped cookie cutter
Miniature alphabet cookie cutters
Baking Sheets

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Whisk together flour and salt in a medium size bowl. Using a mixer, cream the butter and sugar. Add the peanut butter until combined. Add egg yolks and vanilla.

When combined, separate the dough into 2-3 parts, flatten each section slightly and cover with plastic wrap. Working with smaller sections of cookie dough will make it easier to handle when using your rolling pin. You can also keep the sections in the refrigerator that you aren’t working with to keep the dough chilled.

I like working with sugar cookie dough much better than pie dough. It’s really forgiving and you can re-roll the scraps until it’s all gone. Plus, you can roll the dough out in between two sheets of parchment paper really easily and you don’t even have to flour your work surface. That’s the best part. No mess.

Roll out the dough evenly. Then cut out shapes with your heart-shaped cutter, leaving a little space in between each cookie for baking.

For every pair of 4-inch heart cookies, use the alphabet cookie cutters on one heart. (You can spell out words with 4 to 5 letters easily.) When you press the individual letters into the dough, you may need the help of a toothpick to lift up the letters so they can be removed. So have a few handy. Make sure to save all the letter scraps, too. They can be reused.

Transfer the heart-shaped dough cut outs to your baking sheet. You can leave them right on the parchment paper and that way you won’t disturb the shapes. Genius. I learned this little trick from the book, Cookie Craft and it’s made the whole process much more fun.

Bake the cookies for about 10 minutes. Remove and let cool. Then repeat until you have rolled all of the cookie dough and scraps.

When cool, spread a thin layer of raspberry filling on one side of the solid cookie. Sprinkle the other cookie (the one with letter cut outs) with powdered sugar and then gently place on top of the cookie with raspberry filling. Repeat until you have 12 sweet heart cookie sandwiches.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Paula Deen Test Kitchen Note: The alphabet cutters that Bakerella used were a set from Fox Run with each letter being 3/4 inch wide. The 4-inch heart-shaped cutter is from a Wilton 4-piece heart cookie cutter set.