Valentine's Day and then some

We'll start with the 'and then some'.

Last Saturday I attended a baby shower for a friend here who has the cutest 7 week old you ever did see. The lovely host asked if I would make some cookies for the shower. Naturally, I said yes and started thinking about what I could do. For whatever reason, I decided that would be a good time to make my first attempt at icing sugar cookies in a fancy-ish way by trying out royal icing on my cookies. Fortunately, I got my icing recipe from a baking blog that I love and it was delicious.. I have heard some not-so-hot things about the real royal icing, but this recipe was perfect.

So away I went! I baked the cookies, drew out some ideas, and made my first attempt!

While my piping skills are not stellar (I seem to have shaky hand syndrome), I think they came out pretty cute! :)


(The baby's name begins with 'P')


This experience made me excited for future sugar cookies! You basically get to draw on the cookie, which gives you all kinds of fun and freedom to come up with new ideas!

I also found a really good recipe for a fruit salad. It was so pretty all layered up.. Unfortunately the bowl was too reflective to really appreciate it.. BUT it was still delicious. I love me some berries.


So in other news, yesterday was Valentine's Day! I spent a lot of the day grocery shopping, cooking, and writing poems for the various members of our household :) We exchanged our homemade cards and then the real fun came with the dinner time spread..


We had heart-shaped pizzas with my favorite salad, and I found strawberry beer for Sheree and Ian. Ian tells me it was actually pretty good :) You can see the lovely flowers I got from my favorite valentine (the ones on the left.. the other ones were a gift from last weekend from someone else) that helped spruce up our table, too!


Then for dessert I made brownies, cut them into hearts and slathered them with cream cheese and strawberries. I had high hopes to cut the strawberries into hearts too, but alas, they were squishy so we just got strawberry chunks.


Still good enough for me!

I know V-day is overrated, and a lot of people don't enjoy it, but we had a special day and I hope you did too! If not, you can come to our house next year :)