Chocolate has long been integral to the Valentine's Day culinary experience. Truffles, molten cakes, frosted cupcakes, dark cacao puddings and brûlées, ganache-domed cakes and enrobed nuts - they all lend welcome sweetness to Cupid's big day.

A simple sugar cookie can send the same message of love, too. Especially if it's a cookie you've decorated by hand. And it makes more of an impact if you create a beautiful design using royal icing.

If you're used to decorating your cookies with homemade frosting like the kind used for conventional Christmas cookies, then royal icing is a step up: a more refined cookie decoration requiring some skill and patience.

Borrowing from the short messages on conversation heart candies, however, we're here to say, "You Can."

We asked local cookie expert Scott French of Mister French's Gourmet Bakery to tutor us in the ways of royal icing. But first a word about French. The cookie king has been toiling in dough and icing for nearly 20 years now. He started making cookies to give as Christmas gifts. "I just got better and better at it," French said. "My hobby became a side business and then a full-time business."

A corporate trainer for the Pappas family of restaurants, French was making cookies as a sideline, but by the time he participated in his first Nutcracker Market, he knew his cookie talents were about to overshadow his day job. He began Mister French three-and-a-half years ago, working out of a shared kitchen in the Heights.

Though French has traditional oatmeal, peanut butter and chocolate-chip cookies in his portfolio, it is his intricate, hand-decorated sugar cookies with royal icing that are his calling card. His cookies are highly detailed and so eye-catching that he's earned the admiration of corporate clients including Chevron, Rice University, Haliburton, Meals on Wheels and the city of Houston mayor's office. Last year, Mister French was named grand champion Outstanding Showmanship Award at the Best Bites competition at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo's Uncorked! event. French's cookie business, which has doubled every year since he began, is poised to offer cookie-making and -decorating classing this summer.

Now, on to royal icing: This icing, preferred by cookie professionals for its clean, finished results, is traditionally made with confectioner's sugar, egg whites and cream of tartar. Depending on how thick or thin you make the icing, it can be used to flood the entire surface of a cookie with a clean, smooth sugar topcoat and also to pipe decorations and writing. The egg in the icing allows it to dry hard.

French makes his royal icing from confectioner's sugar and meringue powder (the Wilton brand can be purchased at Walmart and Michaels stores). Warm water is added; the frosting is then beaten to desired consistency and flavored with clear vanilla flavoring. A thicker, drier icing is used to pipe outlines on the edges of the cookie. This forms a dam after it has dried. Then icing with a looser consistency is used to fill or "flood" the area.

Once that icing has dried (between six and eight hours), the cookie is ready for decorating with a stiffer icing. Of course, frosting/icing bags with piping tips are needed.

French said royal icing is forgiving because if it drips it can easily be scraped off or cut off the side of the cookie using a razor blade or X-Acto knife. Covering an entire cookie with royal icing requires a flat-surface cookie because the icing is essentially self-leveling. "Don't be afraid of putting a lot of icing on the cookie," he said. "The more icing, the smoother it's going to get."

A steady hand also is required for piping dams and designs. French, ever reassuring, said to keep practicing and remember that mistakes can easily be lifted off the surface of the cookie using a knife or toothpick.

To make a beautiful marbleized design, first ice a cookie then immediately pipe horizontal stripes atop the wet icing. Drag a toothpick up and down the stripes which will bleed and feather into each other creating a marble effect.