Sweetheart Shortbread

Sometimes I just have the urge to have something sweet, but not too sweet. It's times like these when this recipe, which produces a light cookie with a bit of a crunch, comes in handy.

I've made this recipe many times already, each time giving the cookies a different look. The first time I made the cookies, I followed the recipe exactly and made even rectangles with rows of holes made by a fork, which was definitely the quickest and simplest method. Last time I made them, I rolled the dough out very thinly so that I could use my Williams-Sonoma animal cracker cookie cutters.

This time, I wanted yet another change. From the colors of the cookies, you can sort of tell that I was inspired by those Sweetheart Conversation Hearts that are so popular on V-Day. I thought it'd be cute to have colorful heart cookies, so I mixed food coloring into the dough and cut my cookies out with my trusty heart cookie cutter. The cookies came out of the oven cute and puffy, a wonderful post-Valentine's Day delight.

Baking with Photoshop!

Not an actual food post today, but I just wanted to share this video with all of you. What if there were a program that allowed us to make cookies with just a couple clicks on a computer screen? I found this video intriguing because it combines two important aspects of food blogging: baking and "photo editing", in an unexpected way.



This lovely video was created by Maya Rota Klein with stop-motion for the Adobe YOUGC Contest. Enjoy!

Potter Puppet Pals!

Today's post involves a bit of catch-up. If you have been keeping up with my blog, you'll know that back in January I had my Harry Potter Party. Originally, I had intended to serve these Potter Puppet Pal sugar cookies at the party, along with all the other HP-themed foods, but, I ran out of time to finish them. Instead, I ended up icing them two days later and I'm finally posting about them today.

If you aren't familiar with Potter Puppet Pals, it's a live action comedy series created by Neil Cicierega. The main characters of Harry Potter appear as hand puppets (except for Neville, who shows up as a butternut squash :D). My favorite episode is "The Mysterious Ticking Noise", which according to Wikipedia is the 15th most viewed video on Youtube. I attached it to the bottom of this post for those of you who haven't seen it.

By the way, there's no Fred and George in Potter Puppet Pals. I just thought it was funny that 2 Rons = Fred + George, who happen to be my favorite characters in the HP series :).