It seems a little weird to be posting Valentine’s Day-themed sprinkled cookies this close to Halloween, but I’m going to let it slide just this once. The reason behind all the red, pink and white hearts is that my office recently held a surprise wedding shower for a co-worker who is getting married this weekend and I offered to bake something for the treats table. These cookies turned out so well that I just had to share them. Normally I don’t use real butter or white flour in my baking, but it’s shortbread and I really like to pull out all the stops when I’m baking for other people (aka not just for me and Trevor).

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Where did January go? I feel like it was just yesterday that I was celebrating the new year. Now every time I go into the grocery store, I’m being bombarded by flowers and chocolates and everything that goes hand-in-hand with Valentine’s Day.

Not that I mind having another reason to buy more chocolate. Mmmmm, chocolate.

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I always like to check out the discount produce section at grocery stores. I’ve always found its are the best place to get ripe bananas that are just begging to be baked into a delicious banana bread or muffin. One day when checking out our local grocery store, we found it loaded with packages of pomegranates. The produce priced at 6 for $1.49, was ripe, but still decent enough to last a few days. Considering the usual price of pomegranates, I thought it was a steal of a deal and picked up a package.

I spent the next few days covered in pomegranate juice. There was no dignified way to eat one and not look like I was in a terrible accident. When I was finally down to two pomegranates, I was at my wits end and turned to the internet for advice.

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I’ll admit though, I was a little bit nervous. I mean, these cookies are known as drop cookies, meaning they spread and form their own shape when baked. Would the dough listen to my predetermined cookie cutter or would they get it their little minds to create their own shape? Also since there are chocolate chips wouldn’t it be, oh I dunno, difficult to cut with a cookie cutter? I slowly accepted these fears as a challenge and decided to push through.

I blamed my chocolate chip cookie craving.

One thing I noticed that there is no baking soda in the recipe, so there would be minimal dough rising/forming. Still, I was a little skeptical that my cookies would be able to keep their shapes. Just because someone else was successful at it doesn’t mean that I would be just as successful. The universe is mysterious and cruel that way.

Callye makes a note that is to use a good cutter and boy she wasn’t kidding! Those chocolate chips are rough to cut through. I didn’t have any mini chocolate chips on hand since I just bought a huge bag of semi-sweet regulars from Costco, so something tells me that having minis makes the cutting process easier.

What she didn’t mention was how good the cookie dough is on its own. I guess that goes without saying though, as this pile of scraps used to be bigger.

So here are the cookies before they went into the oven. You can bet I was crossing my fingers that they would keep their heart shapes.

And they did! These chocolate chip cookies were moist and delicious and I highly recommend the recipe. I even substituted the butter for margarine (a frequent habit of mine) and accidentally added a full egg instead of just the required yolk (not a frequent habit – I was making supper at the same time and taking photos) and they tasted just as great with a cold glass of milk.

Happy (early) Valentine’s Day.

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Plus a white background makes your other decorations pop nicely, whether its more icing, sprinkles or drawing with edible writing markers. I bought these bad boys at Michaels with a 40% off coupon (they always get me). I’m not sure if you can buy Americolor in Canada which is the edible marker brand that everyone raves about, but these work just fine.

Mmmm, nothing beats a platter of Valentine’s Day cookies!

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Right after I came home from Christmas, I decided to take a Michael’s cake decorating class. I’d been meaning to do this for years and now I didn’t have to excuse of unexpected (film) work coming up, so what was holding me back?

So on a busy Saturday, I went and signed up for the basic class set to start on January 30th.

Cut to three weeks later, I had all my supplies neatly organized in my reusable Sobey’s bag (blueberry theme), my class syllabus and my receipt (this later made a big difference). I made sugar cookies on Friday (real butter!) and had the required six tucked away lovingly in a baggie, wrapped in paper towel and nested in a plastic container to later bring home decorated with the Wilton brand icing I purchased……or so I thought.

I arrived at the class 10 minutes early and waited as the Michael’s associates set up around myself and two other early birds. As we settled in our seats, and others joined us, I began to notice what everyone else had in their bulging bags. This didn’t immediately alarm me, but I saw that one lady had a gum paste kit with her. Then I saw another already had her icing bags set up and ready to go. These items were not listed on the required items list. Suddenly fear and panic set in. Did I come on the wrong date? Wrong time? Wrong class?

My fears were confirmed when I approached the teacher in front of everyone. Apparently when I registered for the class, the sales associate had accidentally put me in the intermediate cake decorating class, but still given me a basics syllabus and outline. These people already knew how to ice a cake and properly pipe roses with ease, where as I could barely fill an icing bag and keep my hands their normal colour.

Thankfully, a store manager took pity on my panic and saved me before the class really began, so I really only humiliated myself in front of half a dozen more talented people. I was led away from the room of the prying, nosy and probably judgmental eyes to the front of store registers, where I was properly registered for the next upcoming decorating basics class starting on February 18th and given a heartfelt apology for the mix-up.

Now working years in a retail setting myself, I knew it wasn’t the store managers fault, so I was polite and thankful and even making jokes about the mix-up. Inside I was steaming and red-faced and wanting the whole thing to be over and to be speeding down the road in my car, driving far, far away from this whole ordeal.

So I went back home, slightly demoralized from the whole experience and even a little sad, especially because I’d been looking so forward to taking this class. I tried not to make a big deal about it, considering that I’m still taking the class (19 days later than expected).

How did I fix this funk that I was in? I took to the facebook to mildly vent and my friends had the best idea: CUPCAKES.

Mini vanilla cupcakes with pink/white swirled icing with a few drops of almond flavouring. Delicious.

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I had a terrible week that started right after my hand mixer decided to die on me, so last Friday when I got home from work, I decided that the only cure would be to make some cookies and spend the night decorating them. I had just bought some heart cutters from Dollarama and wanted to put them to good use. I had even found a decent sounding recipe for cookie icing that didn’t involve the needing of a mixer.

My only problem was that when I opened the fridge, I realized I was out of butter. I still had on hand a box of margarine squares sitting in the back, but I was in the middle of making supper and there was no way that I wanted to deal with rush hour, despite having two grocery stores just down the street from us. So I sucked it up and used margarine instead.

I’m sure this is probably not going to come as a shock to anyone, but the bare cookies had a little “off” taste to them. They were still edible and Trevor raved about them all night, but to me, they didn’t have the same rich, savory flavour. The icing recipe isn’t even worth posting, as although it looked nice, it was a pain to pipe and it wasn’t the same royal cookie icing taste that I’m used to. It also didn’t harden properly after 48 hours of sitting out, so some of the tops got squashed during packaging.

So lessons learned:

1). NOTHING beats butter in cookies. Seriously, the next time butter comes on sale, I’m stocking up so I don’t find myself in the same situation.

2). Double tie your piping bags. I wish I had taken a picture of the mess I had created, but lets just say that one of my bags exploded black icing all over my table and some of the cookies. I blame the consistency of the icing. And the icing recipe. And my shaky hands.

3). Make cookies with lots of time to spare. It was well after midnight when I finally put the piping bag down and I had been up since 6am, so I was a little cross-eyed.

Still though, it was nice to practice my piping. And if you recognize the handwriting of the word “love” that’s because it’s from a wonderful video tutorial from Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle. (Although she has much better writing).

And if it makes you feel better, I made cookies again tonight WITH butter and they turned out perfect. I’m also going to attempt to make royal icing by hand. But that is for next week…

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