Woven Heart | Mother Crafter

DIY Valentine: Chocolate Orange Heart Cookies

February 10, 2012 at 17:39 | Posted in Crafts - DIY | 1 Comment
Tags: baking, Chocolate, Chocolate Orange, Cookies, DIY Valentine, Heart, Maizena, Recipe, sweet valentine, Valentine Day, Woven Heart

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner! Continuing with the DIY Valentine series, this week I baked some yummy Chocolate Orange cookies.

I got the recipe from a old, old booklet from a famous brand of corn starch in Argentina, Mi primer recetario Maizena. I think I got it when I was 11 years old!!! Ok, forget the old, old part now

They are call Masitas Secas and here is the recipe:

6 oz corn starch – 3.5 oz flour – pinch of salt – 5 oz sugar – zest from 1 orange – 2.6 oz unsalted butter – 1 egg – 1/2 cup orange juice.

Sift the cornstarch onto a clean surface or big bowl with the flour and salt. Make a hole in the middle and put the sugar,orange zest, butter and egg into it. Using your hands, work the ingredients until they are blended all together.

Add the orange juice and form a smooth dough (you might need to add more flour). Wrap it in film and let it rest in the fridge for half an hour. Sprinkle flour onto the counter and roll-out the dough with a (also sprinkled with flour) rolling pin to 1/4 inch thick. Using a cookie cutter, cut hearts shapes and placed at least 1-inch apart on a greased baking sheet. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F for 12 minutes or until cookies are just beginning to turn brown around the edges. Let sit for 2 minutes and transfer to a cooling rack.

The recipe said to make a glaze with orange juice and confectioners’ sugar. Being a choco-aholic, I didn’t do that. It is Valentine’s Day after all, and chocolate and romance have always been synonymous. So… I melted chocolate chips instead. And summerged all the cookies in it. Gulp! Yum!

Then, for final presentation, I put them in a jar with lace around to complete the package.

A sweet Valentine to enjoy. Mi cookies are already gone by now

If you are looking for more ideas to make your Valentines, check the rest of the series, including the Free Printable Elephant Love Postcards (featured in The Huffington Post!), the Woven Heart Racquet, and the Map of Love canvas.

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DIY Valentines:Woven Heart Racquet

January 8, 2012 at 23:26 | Posted in Crafts - DIY, Tutorials | 11 Comments
Tags: awesome valentine, craft, DIY Valentine, Heart, Tennis Racquet, Valentine, valentine s day, Valentines Day, Weaving, Woven Heart

Valentine’s day is almost a month away! From now until then, I will post projects and ideas for you to make your own Valentines.

The first project is this pretty cool woven heart racquet.

This was actually a birthday gift for my friend Jennifer, who loves to play tennis and is really pretty good at it (she kicks ass). But it can also be a nice Valentine for anybody.

To make it, you just need to go to your favorite thrift store and look for a (preferably vintage) tennis racquet. I found mine at Goodwill, and it cost me only $2,99 (bargain!). I am a visual person, so I needed to print a diagram at real scale to use as a guide. You can download the one I made here.

Then grab some left over yarn or ribbon you might have laying around, attach a safety pin to one end, and start weaving the heart through the strings of the racquet following the diagram (I taped mine to it).

I started to do so horizontally, but that wasn’t right. So I had to unweave it and start again, this time weaving it vertically. DO NOT do it like this (see below) because the humps of the heart are not continuous.

Instead start on one of the sides of the heart (sorry, no pictures). My yarn was chunky so I only needed it to weave the same line of squares two times (up and down), But if whatever you are using is thinner, you will need to weave up and down as necessarily to fill the squares.

And ta-da! You now have an awesome Valentine for your love one! Easy and very, very inexpensive.