I’m very excited to share these cookies with you. This little cookie box, packed with hearts would be such a lovely gift! While I love the look of decorated sugar cookies, most of them are just too sweet and lacking in flavour. I have solved that problem by flavouring and colouring the icing naturally, with freeze dried fruit powder. These are sugar cookies that people will actually want to eat.

Freeze dried fruit is not the same as dried fruit. Dried fruit is dehydrated and only about 75% of the water is removed. With freeze-drying, the fruit is placed into a vacuum chamber where the temperature is well-below freezing and 99% of the moisture can be removed from the fruit.

There are so many fruits that are freeze dried these days. I chose strawberry, raspberry, blueberry and peach. I buy my freeze dried fruit online. You can grind up the fruit in a food processor or spice grinder. I like to strain the powder after grinding, to eliminate any seeds. I mixed up a big batch of royal icing and divided it into 4 bowls and added the fruit powder until I got the colour and flavour I wanted. I also mixed in a little fresh lemon juice to brighten the flavours.

For the cookies, I used my favourite sugar cookie recipe from Bon Appetit. It uses brown sugar instead of regular granulated sugar, They are a little bit chewy in the centre and very delicious. I used a variety of heart cookie cutters sizes. I bought these ones on Etsy this year.