[I] Heart cheesecake

Cheesecake.

It happened again:

This time, it was a heart-shape vanilla base cheesecake with chocolate swirl.

I used the recipe from this post.

I used graham crumbs – which you can find at most grocery or bulk food stores – for the crust.

The heart shape was thanks to a lovely, heart-shape, springform pan that I somewhat recently acquired.

Check out the cake as it was cooling in the pan:

And again:

And one more angle on the cake, post-pan:

So pretty.

So tasty.

Additional The Baking cheesecake content here.

 

[Everyone] heart[s] cookies

I made cookies. 

The cookies were shaped like hearts.

Here they are:

I used my usual cookie formula, with a few modifications.

But I didn’t use a cookie cutter to make the heart shapes.

Really.

Look carefully at the cookie in the centre of the picture. You might be able to see small seam-like lines that give away how the heart shape was made. I took three round pieces of cookie dough, flattened them into regular, round-ish shapes, and then shaped and pushed the pieces together into a heart-like shape. I used the edge of a butter knife to straighten out some of the edges.

As for the modifications to the cookie formula, I added about a teaspoon or so of cocoa powder to the dough, and used about a quarter of a cup each of chocolate chips and chopped hazelnuts. I used cold coffee as the main liquid ingredient.

I added the cinnamon hearts and heart-shape gummies – both from a bulk food store – as the cookies were cooling on a wire rack after baking. I used the still-melted chocolate chips as a sort of glue and pressed the cinnamon hearts and gummies into exposed chocolate chips. Once the chocolate had cooled and hardened, the cinnamon hearts and gummies stuck.

 

A cupcake valentine

There’s this day this week that just happens to be February 14.

That’s nice: how about some cupcakes?

This is another modified version of something from that oh-so-wonderful book of cupcake recipes. I modified the recipe for the basic vanilla cupcakes to use water instead of milk. And I used cold coffee instead of milk for the vanilla buttercream icing.

I also put a small amount of red pigment gel food colouring into both the cupcake batter and the icing. That’s right: pink batter and pink icing. Most excellent.

I find it best to add the food colour at the same time as liquid ingredients for the batter – and with the margarine for the icing.

The cupcakes looked like this before I put the icing on:

I used my icing gun – with a large, round tip – to put the icing onto the cupcakes once they were cool.

I decided to make a spiral of icing onto the top of each cupcake. And, then, I free-handed hearts – some big, some small – in icing on top of the spirals.

Like this:

Use cinnamon heart candy to decorate some of the cupcakes.

Like this:

Or this:

I got the cinnamon hearts at a bulk food store. I got the red pigment gel food colouring at a bulk food store as well. If you don’t like cinnamon hearts, or want to use another kind of decoration, those candy hearts with messages might look good – and so might pretty much any other kind of candy, chocolate, or sprinkle.

Happy February 14.