Valentine's Day

So I know this post is coming a day late, but hey better late than never. Valentine's Day is one of those holidays that people can be very opinionated on some love it, some hate it, and some believe that it is a holiday developed by greeting card companies to make more money. If you push all of those things aside for a few minutes you can focus on the more important part of all this...wait for it...the food!

Yes that's right the food. I sometimes like to think of it as a "free day", to eat what you want and not feel guilty. Of course there's the fact that often large amounts of chocolate are involved on Valentine's Day, which is an added bonus that makes me want to jump for joy. This brings me to the focus of this post sweet treats to give as a gift or enjoy for yourself.
Since time wasn't exactly on my side this year I kept things pretty simple using some time tested recipes and adding a twist. I made 3 batches of cookies chocolate chip, dark chocolate M&M, and sugar. I used the chocolate chip cookie recipe I posted last year, minus the "healthy twist" because really as much as I like to promote being healthy whenever possible, I couldn't do that today. Now for the dark chocolate M&M cookies I went ahead and used the same chocolate chip cookie dough recipe substituting the M&Ms for the chocolate chips (sorry ahead of time for not having pictures of these). However, I do have an M&M cookie recipe I just didn't feel like digging it out when I already had the chocolate chip one in front of me. As for the sugar cookie recipe, I think this one is wonderful. I got it from my mom and what makes it so special is that this one is for drop or bar cookies and not meant to be rolled out. So whenever you're wanting sugar cookies you can have them without needing all the time to roll and cut them out. I think it sounds like a winning situation.

So as my final twist on these cookies, I baked some in the heart shaped mini cake pan my friend gave me for Christmas to mix in with the regular drop cookies. The cool thing about the heart shaped cookies is that they're thicker, so you essentially get a cookie cake, which is delicious.