Baking & Cuteness

I caught the baking bug simply because I wanted to leave plenty of yum-yums for my beloved while we headed out of town. First of all, who knew it was so easy to make shortbread?? Really? Less than a handful of ingredients and BAM...yummy goodness. One of the first wedding showers I had, my mom gifted me with a cookbook from our church. It was the 25 year anniversary cookbook, compiled with all sorts of recipes from the women in the church. I scanned through the recipes and recognized almost all of the names. It brought back fond memories of the time I spent at St. John Neumann. By the way, for those of you not in the know, if you don't own a cookbook from a church, then you are missing out. These little gems have proven recipes in there, many of them are traditional Southern comfort food. Speaking of SoCo....ok, back with a drink in hand.

Anyway, first up, we have pineapple squares. Don's Aunt K gifted me this recipe on our wedding day. The first time he took me to Salina for Christmas, I fell in love with this dish! I'd scoured the Internets for the recipe and none of them yielded the results like I wanted. This dish sealed our fate, and as it would be, 5 months after eating it, we were engaged. During the engagement process, I wanted recipes galore, even requesting them as part of the RSVP for the invitations. Inside our wedding gift was this treasured recipe. And nearly 5 years later, it was totally worth getting married to Don just to get my hands on it! ;) All kidding aside, this is delicious! I still don't have it down pat like she makes them, but I'm getting better. Instead of making a large pan, I made individual servings so he could enjoy for the week. Unfortunately, they came out a tad drier than the larger pan, but they are still good.

Next up, shortbread. Don loves dark chocolate. Me, not so much. On my last trip to the store, I'd splurged on some fancy-schmancy dark chocolate chunks. They totally filled up all of my luxury item budget, but it was well worth it for a surprise for him. I was unsure how much shortbread dough this would make, especially since the recipe called for it to be split in half while baking. There was no need to divide it in half, though because this was just fine. AND I tasted it and boy, was that some deliciousness right there. Today, it is all gone.
And just for fun, here's my sugarbean not happy about being up early. This was taken last Friday when it was cold. After snapping this photo, she was totally diggin' her mittens. So much so that I catch her wearing socks on her hands. I think I need to consider making her some sock puppets.