A Very Valentine's Menu

Yep. It was pretty epic. I would have also photographed the charcuterie plate but Piper ate almost all the sausage before we got home from the airport.

Valentine's Day Guide or: How to Pick Your Boyfriend Up from the Airport

A few pretty little things...

Intense Chocolate Mini-Cakes with Rum Buttercream

If you're going to go Valentine's, go decadent. That's the current motto under which I'm operating, especially after today's preparatory trip to Whole Foods (gulp).

Off the Beaten Path: Valentine's Flicks

I know there are a lot of Valentine's haters out there, but I've never really seen the point. Valentine's Day is a day to celebrate love; we all (hopefully) have some form of love in our lives, be it romantic, familial, friendly. And we get an entire day to remember it, celebrate it and share it! I think it's lovely.

We enter a very important phase of Valentine's Day preparation: the film. What you watch and who you watch it with can make a world of difference between a memorable Valentine's Day and a "that time we watched Love Actually that wasn't Christmas" kind of day. We all know the classics: Titanic, Romeo + Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, etc. Boring (or not, I'll be watching Romeo + Juliet, don'tlookatme). But, dear reader, whether you've got a honey by your side on the big day or not, I shall now draw upon my five years of cinema scholarship and select five more offbeat films that will make your night something to remember.

Valentine's Brown Butter Spice Cookies

A few days ago I posted my desire to invent my first cookie. A Valentine's cookie. A "sexy" cookie, if you will (not some milksop sugar concoction with tastelessly sweet frosting). And voila, a few tries and a few cardboard-tasting failures later and I have found my cookie. A bit nutty, a bit chocolatey and a bit spicy. Mouth-meltingly soft. What more can you ask for? I'll still be playing around with this a bit; I had one try that came out perfectly and the others have been a bit varied, but I'll keep this recipe updated.

Valentine's Cookie Musings

I've been toying around with the idea of a Valentine's Day cookie for a little while and this morning I had a few ideas that I wanted to jot down. The usual "sugar cookie with crumbly royal icing" has always seemed a little insipid to me, especially where Valentine's Day is concerned. Those cookies are fine if they're representing some kind of little schoolgirl crush, but I want a sexy cookie (yeah, I said it.) A cookie that evokes the deep, toe-curling, passionate feeling of full-blown love.