Valentine's Day baking

I don't do romantic.  I don't do sweet, lovey dovey stuff.  I don't do flowers or hearts.  I don't really like rom coms, or romance/chick-lit style books.  So Valentine's day is something I'm quite happy to overlook, or at least not take very seriously.  I don't mind if it's taken a bit tongue-in-cheek though, that's fine.  Last year, knowing how much I dislike cut flowers (why buy someone flowers?  They're just going to die, waste of money! There are other pretty things you can buy which will last much longer, like earrings, or a book) my boyfriend bought be a bag of flours.  1.5kg of plain, 1.5kg of self-raising and 500g of white bread flour.  I loved it!

For Christmas I was given some cookie cutters that come complete with letters.  The idea is that you put the letters you want on to the bottom of the cookie cutter, so that when you press out the shape the letters imprint on the dough as well.  I picked them up when I went back to Cambridge for the weekend, and I thought 14th Feb would be a good excuse to try them out, as I could bring my own take on Valentine's Day messages!  Also, it fits in with me actually using the things I own, and doing new things.

Well.  It was all a bit fiddly!  I washed the whole set, and then left to dry on some kitchen towel.  The letters are so small (the photo is of them on a dinner plate) and already it looked fiddly.  I roughly put them in alphabetical order (there are two full sets of the alphabet plus one extra of each popular letter (not enough fs for 'fluffy' sadly)) and that was hard enough as I had to think of them all as a mirror image. And the I is teeny tiny!  Anyway.  I used the biscuit dough I made for my smiley faces cookies and whilst it was chilling in the fridge, I got to work trying to put those fiddly little letters on to the cookie cutters.

They've got a spring on the top, to press down the letters.  But to get the teeny tiny letters on to the base, you have to push the spring down so the base is level with the edge of the cutter.  So with one hand pushing that down, you've got one hand to get the teeny tiny letters on to the base.  It was hard!  The letters don't just slide on, you have to push them quite forcefully, and the heart and star were even harder as their bottom row has an angled start due to their shape, so you get one bit lined up and the other bit doesn't fit, and then you've released the spring and it's all gone on the floor, but that doesn't really matter as you realise you got the letters in the wrong order anyway.

Eventually, I had some phrases on the cutters, as you can see I used the 'I LOVE YOU' and 'HAPPY' and 'HOLIDAYS' which come already made up.  I was quite annoyed at the star, which is why I only got as far as 'WISH'.

I rolled out the dough, and then tried to print one.

Not the greatest success.  The purple one I clearly pushed down too hard, and the middle got a bit stuck.  I then used a little bit of cake release spray (which is brilliant at getting cakes out of tins) on the heart and star letters, and I floured the edges of the cutters, but they didn't work either. Also, where I had left the second row of the star blank, the bars had left a mark, which was just ugly.


By this point, I had had enough!  I am not one to give up usually, especially not over something as daft as cookies, but I'd already spent about an hour to get to this bit (those letters are so fiddly!) and I just didn't want to do anymore. I doubted that the finished result would be worth the effort, and I didn't want to just cut out plain biscuits, so I rolled the dough up and it's now in the freezer for when I do want biscuits.

I'm going to wash up the baking set (those letters!) and then I think this will be heading for the charity shop. I don't have the patience to try and make them again, I had considered using them with Brownies but if I found getting the letters on to the shapes hard, I think they'll find it near impossible, there will be lots of "Flufffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffy Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwl I can't dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo it" if I know my girls!

So a bit disappointing, all in all, but at least I gave it a go, which counts for something, right?