Valentine cookies

I've been following a blog Bake at 350: (bakeat350.blogspot.com) She makes these amazing cookies in every kind of shape and size. Most importantly she has a lot of advice on how to get the correct consistency, color and flavor of icing. The most difficult thing for me is that my royal icing is never shiny when it dries. Apparently I'm overbeating it. So with these cookies I only beat the frosting for 5 minutes (half of the 10 min on the directions). I can see a tiny improvement from my Halloween cookies, but they're still not what I'd hoped. Oh well, I just have to keep working at it which means MORE COOKIES!