Valentine’s day is the perfect time to do something special for loved ones.

It is also a great time to cook with friends. So I invited three of my friends over and we baked three batches of cookies to use as Valentine’s Day gifts. This is a great way of doing it for many reasons. Two of the reasons are that you can enjoy the hilarity of three different ways of doing everything in the kitchen. You can also admire the expertise and hidden talents of your friends. Believe me, they are an amazing group of ladies.

Who are the cookies for?

In two cases, the sugar discs were mainly for the little ones. The toddlers that fail at being articulate, but know what those little round things are. It’s neat watching their faces light up, right before the automatic grabbing responses kick in. Another lady cooked for friends visiting town for a couple of days. What’s nicer than have a bunch of homemade cookies in the hotel room rather than a six-dollar snicker bar?

What flavor of cookies did we choose?

 

The choices were dark chocolate cherry cookies, snicker doodles, and I chose Alton Brown’s chocolate chip cookie thin recipe. Alton has a handy table to make chocolate chip cookies the way you like them, thick and moist or thin and buttery. Almost all of the recipes I use come from Alton. Why? My career was as a bench molecular biologist. So I spent my days adding a few milliliters of this fluid to a test tube, incubating it for thirty minutes, and then added some DNA or cells, and then shaking the mixture overnight, etc. So you can see my working life was very similar to cooking. As a result, I really appreciate the scientific approach to creating food (if you are interested in the science of food, be sure to check out the books “CookWise,” “On Food and Cooking” or “The Science of Good Cooking”).

Who did I make cookies for?

My DH (Dear Husband). On Valentine’s Day, our classic car club drives around the San Diego countryside. So imagine the pleasure of my handsome Regency duke, rake, bang-up cove, MGTD car-driving, DH returning home to find the kitchen wench made him a proper cookie. While the rakes we love may not exhibit the features of the more quiet, humble gentlemen, in the end, all gentlemen like to return home to a sweet treat.

If you want to bake a batch of cookies for the rake in your life, here’s Alton Brown’s chocolate chip cookie recipe (romance author tested and approved!):

Ingredients:

• 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 egg
• 2 ounces milk
• 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 sticks unsalted butter
• 1 cup sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:

Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Sift together the flour, salt, and baking soda in a mixing bowl. Combine the egg, milk, and vanilla and bring to room temperature in another bowl.

Cream the butter in the mixer’s work bowl, starting on low speed to soften the butter. Add the sugars. Increase the speed, and cream the mixture until light and fluffy. Reduce the speed and add the egg mixture slowly. Increase the speed and mix until well combined.

Slowly add the flour mixture, scraping the sides of the bowl until thoroughly combined. Stir in the chocolate chips. Scoop onto parchment-lined baking sheets, 6 cookies per sheet. Bake for 13 to 15 minutes, checking the cookies after 5 minutes. Rotate the baking sheet for more even browning.

Remove the cookies from the pans immediately. Once cooled, store in an airtight container.

Read more at http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/the-thin-recipe.html.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

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Sally Orr worked for 30 years in academic research, when one day a friend challenged her to write a novel. Since she is a hopeless Anglophile, her books are by default Regency romances. She lives with her husband surrounded by books, modernist mid-century dishes, and English cars in San Diego, California.

Sally can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and SallyOrr.com.