Valentine's Day is kind of a big deal

to me.

I (honestly!) do not care if you send me flowers or chocolate or jewelry or whatever. But give me some cheesy heart shaped confetti and over the top decorations, and I am in heaven. I will wear pink and red and pass out conversation hearts. Now, it's only recently that I discovered all of this. Or rather, that I was willing to admit it. My name is Melissa and I love cheesy Valentine's Day crap. And now that I have a kid, I do lame-o stuff like this:

cheeeeeeeeese!

This year, I decided I would make heart shaped sugar cookies. A few years ago, I was on a sugar cookie tear, and was rocking the royal icing. This year, I wanted to make the cookies egg free, so Max could eat them*.  The cookie part was easy. I used this recipe (doubled, because I wasn't fully thinking that 8 dozen cookies was NINETY SIX cookies. It ended up being more like 80) They're super yummy. They taste like those butter cookies in the blue tins.

But the icing was a bit more difficult. I wanted something that would behave like royal icing without the egg. With some Facebook asking (is there a term for that yet?), my mom's obsessive googling, and my incredible knack for identifying the perfect recipe (one of those things is not really true), I ended up using this recipe. I used lemon juice instead of vanilla or almond extract.

It was pretty good. The thing about royal icing is that it's pretty easy to work with. You can put it in those condiment squeeze bottles and decorate til your heart's content. This is not that icing. Because it uses corn syrup (oh the humanity!), it's sort of sticky and ooey gooey. It's possible if I had made it thinner, that I would have been able to decorate the way I wanted (I was envisioning X's and O's and little icing arrows drawn on the hearts.) But I ended up doing some of that looks-fancy-but-isn't-really "marbling". Truthfully, it was after 8pm on Sunday by the time I got around to decorating, and I was sort of at the point of "just slap something pretty-ish on the cookies and go to bed"

Anyway, happy Valentine's Day to you, and all of your in-the-closet-about- their-cheesy-Valentines-love friends and family.

*I'm not giving Max these cookies with corn syrup and 95 lbs of sugar!

Ok, I made some without the icing that he may get to enjoy.

Another first-

Despite my love of baking, I had never made a pie. Ever. So on June 2, I had a random day off, and I made my very first pie ever. Cherry. Complete with lattice crust. It was delicious.

damn good cherry pie.

Feeling Homesick

One of the things I miss about Philly is the ability to get soft pretzels easily. It's silly, because I didn't eat them that often. There's a chain called The Philly Soft Pretzel Factory that makes giant twist soft pretzels. And in different flavors, like bagels. I love the "everything" That and a cup of soup made for a perfect lunch.

Shortly after moving here, I got a craving for soft pretzels. Having never made a yeast recipe, I scoured the internets for the perfect one, and came upon Alton Brown's. LPR will say I chose this recipe because I have a crush on Mr. Brown. I argue that this recipe had the best reviews.


It wasn't as difficult as I expected, but then, this is what I ended up with:

Once baked, they tasted fine, but still looked funny. In my expert opinion, I would say that they needed more flour, which probably would have made the dough waaaay less sticky and easier to shape. They weren't quite dense enough, which probably would have been corrected with more flour as well.

I will probably try again, but not until it cools down. Did I mention we don't have AC?