hearts

These Sweet & Sour Lemon Cookies will make your lips pucker in the best possible way. The first bite is really tart because the glaze is made with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and a healthy amount of lemon zest. As you chew, the sweetness of the cookie itself — which has the barest hint of lemon — comes through to smooth everything out. It’s the perfect expression of love itself. I don’t know about you, but the people I love the most are also the ones that can break my heart.

Oh-so-red and oh-so-delicious. I’ve already confessed to my passion about baking Brown Butter Cutout Cookies for Valentine’s Day (see With All My Heart). Now I’m admitting that red is my color of choice to decorate cookies for this holiday. But getting the right shade of red is not an easy feat because adding enough food coloring to get the red you want can sometimes negatively affect the taste of your cookie.

There are a two holidays where most people are inclined to throw caution to the wind when it comes to monitoring their sugar intake: Christmas and Valentine’s Day. So I saw no reason to hold back on these beautiful embossed Brown Sugar Cutout Cookies. After covering them with embossed homemade fondant (a yummy combination of white chocolate “dough” and melted marshmallows), I lightly dusted them with confectioners’ sugar for an elegant highlight. You’re welcome!

Gingerbread Valentines? Why not? If someone you love happens to L-O-V-E gingerbread, then gingerbread cookies are the best sweet treat you can give them for Valentine’s Day.

I   Valentines

Valentine’s Day is one of my favorite “cookie” holidays. This year I decided to decorate my creations in a variety of ways to celebrate the sweet side of love ... and to let my inner Cupid out to express the joy of the day. I chose Brown Butter Cookies as my canvas because the flavor is nutty, complex, and irresistible — a lot like love itself.

These Brown Butter Cookies are a gourmet twist on sugar cookies. They have a deep, rich, caramelized taste, and are decorated with white and dark modeling chocolate. The embossing gives them an added elegance, sort of like a cookie in a tuxedo.

Although 90% of the cookies I decorate are full of color, deep down I love the monochromatic look. I find white-on-white to be the most elegant look a cookie can have. So making cookies as party favors for weddings and bridal showers is one of my favorite projects. When the color palette is limited to white, texture and patterns become the focal point. These heart cookies embossed with floral patterns are a joy to bake and decorate. And, to my mind, white piping on white frosting is the height of grace and elegance.

Cookies can say a lot in just one bite. Each of these heart-shaped cookies says “I love you” ... “Be my Valentine” ... “You are special to me.” I am fortunate to have many people in my life that are important to me and every Valentine’s Day I go crazy making sure they know it. While decorating these pretty bites, I think of each one of my special people and can’t wait to let them know that they have a place in my heart, not only on February 14th, but every day of the year.

A few years ago, I made these five stenciled Valentine’s Day cookies as part of an experiment when I started exploring the world of cookie stencils. I decided I needed to work on my technique before making a whole batch of them! Even though they weren’t perfect, they didn’t last long. And that’s the beauty of making edible art. You can always eat your mistakes.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

Hearts and chocolate...the perfect expression of love on Valentine’s Day. Turn them into cookies and you really have something to celebrate. (It doesn’t hurt to add a hug and a kiss to get the “love” part of the message across.)