Sweet Valentines

We had a great time celebrating Valentine's Day in the Hurst household this year. After the awesome concert, of course, John took me out for our Valentine's date Sunday night since he gets too busy at work during the week. He came home from work Sunday afternoon with a dozen yellow roses (my favorite!) and a bottle of wine. 

Roses: perfect way to start the evening. 

Then he took me to High Cotton steakhouse for dinner, a very nice restaurant in town we've been dying to try. He went all out on this one! I mean it's one classy joint, they scrape the crumbs off your white tablecloth between courses. Fancy! Even better, the steaks we ordered were delicious!

This is a picture from their website. I wasn't going to bust out my camera during dinner after all. 

When we got home from dinner, we had the red velvet whoopie pies I made earlier in the day for dessert. I got the recipe off Pinterest (you can find it here) and they were heavenly. Mine weren't quite as red because I ran out of food coloring. Oh well!

Red velvet whoopie pies with cream cheese icing

And to add to the Valentine's Day sugar fix, my sweet Momma ordered cookies from the Charleston Cookie Company and had them delivered to our house on Valentine's Day. Believe me, they are just as delicious as they are cute! Mom sure knows the way to my heart!

Thanks Mom and Larry! We love you!

 I hope your celebrations were just as sweet!

 Happy Valentine's Day!

Cookies for Santa

It's that time of year again! Time for Christmas baking! I love getting elbow deep in flour and making Christmas cookies. The problem is, if I'm only baking for two people, even one batch is way too many. So this year, my friend Connie and I collaborated to do all our Christmas baking in one fun-filled afternoon and then give all (or most of) the goods away to everyone we know.

Last Sunday, Connie came over, we turned up the Christmas music in the kitchen and we baked and decorated for about 5 hours. We made four recipes that produced 120+ cookies all together! It was marvelous!

First up, the classic iced sugar cookie....

Bow chick bow wow. Yes, Mrs. Gingerbread woman is wearing a bikini top.

And yes, she may be a little lopsided.

Frosted sugar cookies are my favorite Christmas cookies. These are what we always made when I was growing up, so it's not really Christmas for me until I have a few of these babies. This year, I took the easy route and used Betty Crocker's sugar cookie mix. Much less mess and just as good!

I did make my own icing though, so I get credit for that. I used this recipe that was posted on my friend Erin's blog, which originally came from the decorated cookie blog.

Sugar Cookie Icing

"Note: This frosting is similar to royal icing, but I add shortening and flavoring to make it taste delicious. Thus, it dries hard enough to handle and pack when left overnight, but not rock hard, like traditional royal icing. The consistency is NOT the runny kind used for flooding. It's stiffer. Take a spoonful, turn it over the bowl. The frosting should cling to the spoon and slowly fall into the bowl. That's the

right consistency.

4 tblsp meringue powder (available at many supermarkets and in most craft stores)
1/2 cup water
6-7 cups confectioner's sugar (may need more or less, see the consistency advice above)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup Crisco

Whip the meringue powder and water on high speed for a looooong time, several minutes, until it's fluffy and peaks form. Gradually add the rest of the ingredients to desired consistency. Store at room temperature in a sealed container for up to a month."

I used the original recipe for piping around the edges of the cookies, and then made another batch of the icing and watered it down a little for flooding. Be careful not to add too much water though! Just a few teaspoons.

It made quite a mess, but worked pretty good! And the end result is delicious!

Decorating these bad boys took the most time. We baked the cookies first, let them cool while we made the other recipes, and iced them in the end.

Next up were two new cookie recipes for me: Candy Cane Blossoms and Red Velvet Cookies

Do I need to tell you which is which? I think you can figure it out.

I found both of these recipes on Pinterest and will link to the recipe on their original blogs. The Candy Cane Blossoms required making my own colored sugar! Wasn't too hard, but I way overestimated how much I would need. Anyone need a half gallon of red and green sugar?

The Red Velvet Cookies are probably

my favorite! Plus they were the easiest of the bunch! They're made with a box of red velvet cake mix, add a few basic ingredients, add in white chocolate chips, stir and you're done.

Next up was a recipe Connie brought for Snowman Cookie Balls.

Our Snowman Cookie Balls didn't turn out as perfect as the recipe's picture- what whatev. They were still fun to make and they taste delicious! Inside the white chocolate coating is a mixture of ground up Nutter Butters and cream cheese, rolled into balls and frozen. The end result tastes like a peanut butter bonbon. Yum!

After all the baking was done, we split up al the cookies into these fun containers I found at Walmart, for about $3 each.

One set went to my coworker at the magazine, one set went to the family I babysit for, and the two big tins on the bottom went to the MUSC resident office (we sent 80 cookies to them!)

Of course Connie and I kept some for ourselves, too.

Today my coworker returned the favor and gave me this set of traditional Charleston cookies called benne wafers.

The benne wafers have been around in Charleston since colonial times and were brought here from East Africa. The cookies are very crunchy and thin and most of them are delicious-- lemon, chocolate, yum! But a few are a little odd, one is all sesame seed and one is kind of spicy! Either way, it's fun to have some traditional cookies around this Christmas too.

Hope your holidays are as sweet as mine have been so far!

Cooking adventure: baked apples

Unfortunately, John starting his job and me starting my job search has cut back on the amount of Charleston adventures we get to go on during the week. We've spent most of our time the last few weeks at home, working in the yard (blugh) or down at Folly Beach. But don't worry friends, my family is coming into town next week and adventures will abound! I'm sure I'll have plenty of new Charleston places and activities to write about.

This week things got exciting in the kitchen when a brilliant idea came to me while surveying the refrigerator. I had a bunch of apples that were going soft faster than I could eat them and I had a sugar craving. Add those two things together and you get baked apples!

Why have I never made these at home before? They are super easy and don't even require an extra trip to the grocery store. There are recipes galore online, but pretty much this dish is just a mixture of apples, brown sugar, cinnamon and butter.

Here's how I made mine:

I started by slicing up three small apples. You can make full baked apples, but I don't have an apple corer so I didn't want to go that route. I'm also too lazy to peal the apples, but some prefer them pealed.

Then I mixed in about 3/4 cup of brown sugar, 1 Tbs. of cinnamon (more or less to your liking) and couple tablespoons of melted butter. The amounts aren't concrete because it can be changed up to however you like it.

Mix it all together and you get a nice sauce on your apple slices. I read some recipes online add flour to the mix. I didn't, but I realized later that might have helped thicken the sauce.

Then I put them in a baking dish, covered with a glass lid and baked for 45 minutes at 350 degrees.

I let the apples bake while we ate our dinner and went on a short walk around the neighborhood. When we came back, the kitchen smelled heavenly and the apples were soft with a delicious gooey sauce ready to serve. Yum!