My Sweet Valentines

I have not 1, but 8 Valentines to spoil on Valentine's Day! Some years I get more creative with their treats than others...namely the years I'm NOT pregnant, haha! This year I made my sweeties sugar cookies. I was trying to make them look like conversation hearts.

This was my first time to try royal icing on cookies. I've made it before, but only to use as cement for gingerbread houses at Christmas. I colored it with Wilton gel colors. I think they turned out pretty cute, although the icing dried funny on some of them. They look wet around the edges, but they're not. Hmmmm.....



My lettering skills need some practice!




I also followed our tradition of giving everyone a box of actual conversation hearts. Candy always goes over well around here! It's okay to eat cookies and candy for breakfast if it's a holiday, right?? (We did follow up with scrambled eggs about an hour later!)


A little darling (with a bad case of bed head!) inspects her candy.



Mmmmm.....yummy!



Joseph enjoying a cookie.



Jordan

Just in case this helps someone else...

I cut out my cookie dough with a heart-shaped cookie cutter, but they spread out just enough to look kind of weird and misshapen in the oven. I just re-cut them out with the cookie cutter while they were still warm, and voila!--perfect heart shapes again! Now, those of you who bake a lot have probably already figured that out, but it was new to me, so I'm sharing. :) I had lots of eager tasters waiting around to eat the edges that were cut off, so nothing was wasted. (As if cookies could EVER go to waste in a house with 7 kiddos!)



The cookies were enjoyed by all. And I got a sweet card AND a box of chocolates from my honey...Yum!!

Homemade Sourdough Bread...an attempt :)

Well, I told you I was going to let you follow along with my bread baking adventures (or subject you to them, depending on how you look at it, lol!) so here is my latest attempt. I surfed one of my current favorite recipe sites, Allrecipes, and found this recipe for sourdough starter. It uses 3 ingredients: flour, water, and yeast, which sounded easy enough. I mixed it up last Monday, and "fed" it more water and flour, along with a little pinch of sugar, each day until last Thursday, when I tried making bread with it for the first time. I used this recipe for the bread. Now, since both the starter and the bread recipe call for yeast, I am pretty much cheating here...come to find out "real" sourdough starters use just flour, water, and natural yeasts that fall out of the air or something...but who are we kidding? I am a mom of 5 boys under 10; I need all the help I can get! I don't feel the least bit guilty for cheating on this one!!

Anyway, back to my bread...the first attempt made a decent loaf of bread, but not very sourdough-y. Which is fine, since I'd read that it takes a while for your starter to really develop good flavor. I tried my second batch yesterday. It smelled wonderful while it was baking and the flavor was equally good--nice and sourdough-y tasting. I even think it looks pretty! I got a nice crispy/slightly chewy crust by putting a pan of water in the oven and spraying water in there a few times early on to make steam, but the bread itself (inside the crust) was very tender, not at all chewy with great big holes in it like the stuff I've bought at the bakery. Overall, though, not bad! Everyone has enjoyed eating it!!

Here are my 2 loaves from yesterday right when they came out of the oven...


Here's a close-up of one of the loaves...


I have to share a story with you that I thought was funny. When Jeremy first saw my starter (it lived loosely covered on my counter for the first 4 days of its life) he said "So THAT'S how you make sourdough bread? Okay, now you've RUINED it for me forever!" He thought the starter was about the grossest thing he'd seen/heard of in a while! I have to say, though, that he's been enjoying the bread just as much as everybody else! :)