Feeling Heart-y

It's only been a month since Christmas, but we're onto the next holiday. I guess the house looked sort of boring and empty once I hauled the tree out and put away all the Santas and mangers and stuff.

The kids are decorating and Maureen already made all her Valentines for her friends at school. She used glitter glue to decorate the hearts she cut out. I'm down with glitter glue. Actual glitter, not so much. Here she is, creating away.

We put up our window clings. You can see the remnants of the icky icy "snow" we got over the weekend. We put up the gel cling thingys on the front window too, but I couldn't get a decent photo of those.

And Johnny made this enormous heart for us, and in the process he got out every marker and piece of construction paper we own. I guess I should be thankful it doesn't say anything about butts.
And I also did some baking, which as you know is out of character for me. I usually only bake when it's someones birthday (cake and cupcakes) or when I have food getting ready to go bad in the kitchen (stale bread into croutons, brown bananas into banana bread, etc). And trust me, it should stay that way. Baking is not my forte.

But darn it, Food Network Magazine has such lovely photographs, sometimes I quite lose my head.

So on Monday I made Red Velvet Sandwich Cookies. And while not exactly a fail, it's another example of how I can follow a recipe and still not get what I intended.

The recipe did call for a stand mixer, which I don't have, so I used a hand mixer because I hate touching dough and didn't feel like getting out my bread machine and using the dough setting. So maybe that's why my cookies aren't bright red like the picture or why they don't have the crackly texture in the picture. They TASTE pretty good. But cutting frozen dough is difficult and I only got maybe half of what the recipe said I would get. They don't taste like red velvet to me. The filling is yummy and the cookies are yummy, but there is no strong red velvet flavor. Meh. Maybe I should leave the baking to the experts.

Anyway, Happy Valentine's Day super early. Just in case I don't make it back here in time.