These pretty Easter sugar cookies are gently flavoured with vanilla, baked to perfect and then topped with sugar paste in perfectly marbled pastel shades.
Preheat the oven to 200C (180C fan assisted, 400F).
Put the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Whisk until fluffy and pale.
Sift in the flour, baking powder, salt and bicarbonate of soda. Stir until fully combined and clumpy
Gather up the pieces and knead together only as much as it takes to get a smooth ball of dough.
Wrap and place in the fridge to rest and chill for 15 minutes.
Make the icing toppers
While the cookie dough is chilling, clean down your surface and dust with cornflour.
Knead the white sugar paste to soften and divide into four pieces. Add a tiny bit of food colouring to each, leaving one white.
Knead to produce three pastel shades.
Break the balls of sugar paste into small pieces and drop onto the surface to form a mishmash of coloured pieces. Gather it all together knead and twist briefly to produce a marble effect. Don’t overwork as the colours will merge into one.
Roll the icing out to about half a centimetre (¼ inch) thick.
Cut out 20 egg shapes using your egg-shaped cookie cutter. Aim to cut them close together to reduce the need to gather and re-roll the sugar paste as the colours will merge.
Place the sugar paste eggs to one side on a board lightly dusted with cornflour so that they stay flat.
Shape and bake the cookies
Clean your surface and dust with flour. Retrieve your chilled cookie dough and roll it out to approximately 7-8mm thick (approx ⅓ inch).
Cut as many cookies as you can with the same egg-shaped cookie cutter your used for the sugar paste. Again, aim to cut them close together to reduce the need to overwork the dough by gathering and re-rolling too many times. You should get 20 cookies .
Place the cookies on a lined baking sheets as you cut them out. They don't need to be spaced more than a centimetre of two (half inch) apart as they only spread a little bit.
Bake the cookies for 8 minutes or until pale golden at the edges.
Decorate the cookies
In a small container, mix the icing sugar with a teaspoon of water until dissolved to make a 'glue'.
Brush the warm cookies with the 'glue', then place a sugar paste heart on top. Repeat until all the cookies are iced.
Transfer the cookies to cooling rack to cool and crisp up.