Be My Valentine

These are pictures of cookies I made for some families in stepford for Valentine's day. I'm feeling more comfortable with piping, and even used colored sugar on some.



It had been a while since I made some decorated cookies, so overall I was pleased with the final products appearance-wise. (couldn't taste anything cause I gave up desserts for Lent)


Also note that I experimented with chocolate-dipped cookies. I used the cheap 'bark' that they sell in the store, but enhanced the chocolate taste by adding in chocolate morsels to the double boiler. not sure if it was the bark/chocolate ratio, it being applied to the cookies, or just the humidity here in general, but the chocolate never seemed to set all that well.




For these valentine gifts, each kid received their respective letter, decorated especially for them.

for Rushabh:

For Mike and Nancy:

For Alex, Ty, and Sonya:

For AJ and Jacob:

For Maddie and Aidan:

For Ross:

Bake Sale

For the February bake sale, I kept it easy. made four personal pies... 2 cherry and 2 apple... both with the lattice work on top.

as you can see-- the edges got a bit brown, so I either need to employ the foil around the edges or buy one of those fancy bake rings. my cheap ass will probably stick with the foil.

A personal favorite of mine is chocolate covered pretzels, so I rolled up the sleeves and got to dippin'.

I made 13 one-dozen bags of pretzels to donate; in each dozen, there were 4 pretzels that had a decorative pink (dyed white chocolate) squiggles on them. My original attempt was to have that white chocolate be CHERRY flavored, but when I added the cherry extract, the white chocolate melt got stiff. TOTALLY not able to put it in the piping bags. I think because I used imitation extract, so maybe it was a water base, and caused the chocolate to coagulate?

anyways... I scrapped that batch and just went with the plain pink (white) chocolate.

I also took the opportunity to practice piping some chocolate designs on parchment paper.

piping with chocolate is much different than the royal icing. Next time I either need to go with a smaller tip or just have more practice, period. perhaps I might try letting the chocolate cool a little more, too.