Mix together the flour, salt and baking powder in a bowl. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until it becomes light and fluffy. Add the milk to the mixture along with the egg and vanilla, and mix well. Then slowly add the flour mixture until it is just combined.

Shape the dough into a ball, then divide it into two balls. Wrap them in plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

Lightly dust some flour onto your countertop, and roll the dough out until it is ¼ inch thick. Cut out right and left shoe shapes from parchment paper to use as stencils. Cut out shoe shapes from the dough using the stencils. Cut out rectangles from the remaining dough, so that you have 1 rectangle for each shoe.

Stick a lollipop stick onto the underside of each cookie rectangle. Place the rectangles and the shoe cookies on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake the rectangle cookies for about 8 minutes at 350F and the shoe cookies for 10-13 minutes at 350F, until lightly golden. Transfer these to cooling racks and allow to fully cool.

Place the confectioner’s sugar, meringue powder and water into a bowl and beat with an electric mixer for about 7 minutes until the mixture is smooth and when drizzled, stays on the surface for a few seconds. If you find that the icing is too thick, gradually add a few more drops of water. Place about 1/5 of the icing into a smaller bowl and dye it yellow. Dye the remaining larger amount of icing black. Place the icing into piping bags fitted with round tips.

Draw the outline of the black part of the shoes with the black icing. Allow it to harden for about 20 minutes. Add ½ tbsp of water to the remaining black icing. This is to make it runnier. Return the black icing to the piping bag and fill in the black area of the cookie. Allow the icing to fully harden, about 45 minutes. In the meantime, pipe some yellow icing onto the underside of the rectangle cookies and attach them to the shoe cookies to create cookie pops.

Draw on the eyes, nose and whiskers with the yellow icing and allow it to fully set, about 20 minutes.