My teenage niece has well outgrown sappy, sweet Valentine's Day cards, and now favors sarcastic, funny, anti-Valentines instead. I thought I'd help her out this year with some anti-Valentine's Day cookie gifts for her friends by adding a new twist to the classic conversation hearts, and packing it all up in a cute gift box.

Our mini pizza boxes also make perfect cookie gift boxes, so I designed a printable to decorate them. This "Love is..." design might seem too romantic to be an anti-valentine, but it's part of the joke — just wait until you see what I put inside the box later!

Our free Valentine's Day cookie box labels includes 4" and 5" versions to suit both of our box sizes. I printed the 5" version on white sticker paper, cut them out, and grabbed a bunch of 5" white pizza boxes.

I put a "Love is..." sticker on the top of each box...

...and then another on the inside of the lid, to really drive the point home.

Finally, I decorated the sides with the sticker strips.

With the boxes done, it was time to make the cookies! I decided to do traditional sugar cookies frosted with royal icing. I wanted to make sure that the cookies held their shape, though, with clean cut edges and no puffiness. I used Baking a Moment's sugar cookie recipe which promised sugar cookies with neat edges that won't spread as they bake.

Her recipe's ingredients are pretty standard, except for two unique aspects (no leavening, and the addition of cornstarch!) that you can read about on her blog.

For perfectly consistent cookies, I used two techniques. First, I rolled the dough out between two sheets of parchment paper, which kept my counter clean and eliminated the need for extra flour. Second, I used my Joseph Joseph rolling pin with rings to force my dough to be exactly 1/4" thick.

I used a 4" heart cookie cutter to cut out the dough.

I put the cookies on fresh parchment paper on a sheet pan to bake. Since they weren't going to spread, I didn't need to leave very much room between them.

After about 12 minutes, I had perfectly baked cookies with almost no spreading, and clean-cut edges. They stayed nice and light, too. So pretty!

While the cookies cooled, I whipped up some royal icing, using the recipe on my can of Wilton meringue powder. I divided it up and made several different pastel colors for the hearts. I started with the icing really thick for the outlines.

I put the thick icing into a disposable icing bag with a #4 round tip, and outlined the cookies.

Then I thinned the icing to a consistency that would drip off the spoon and smooth back into itself within a second or two.

I put this thinner icing back into the same bag and filled the outline, letting the icing level out to a smooth finish.

I used a toothpick to coax the icing into corners or edges that needed a little help, then tapped the cookie flat on the table a couple times to help level it.

I continued with other colors, until I had a whole batch of pretty pastel cookies.

To turn them into conversation hearts, they just needed a message. And since we were going for sarcastic anti-Valentines, I thought the perfect way to complete "Love is..." was with phrases like "for chumps", "over-rated", and "a joke". I made some deep pink thick royal icing and piped the messages onto the dried cookies.

The cookies are perfect nestled in some shredded paper in the box!

My niece is so excited to share these anti-Valentine's Day cookies with her friends.