Valentine's Day

So for Valentine's day I got inspired by some pre-made dessert packages from a Japanese store to bake some treats for Dylan as a Valentine's gift. I've always seen them, but never had a reason to buy them, so this was a great excuse to fulfill my urge to use these cute packaging kits!
I got a red & white poka-dot chocolate box with locking heart tabs. It came with 4 chocolate paper cups, and a divider. I also got this packaging kit that came with 2 paper baking molds, a paper container to hold the cooked muffins, ribbon, a tag, and a plastic bag to wrap everything in.

I found up a recipe from Martha to make these Brown Sugar Cherry Cakes, which were super easy to make. This cake recipe is a perfect blend between a muffin and coffee cake. It's got the fruity-ness of a muffin and the crispy top and the buttery-ness of a coffee cake. Two attributes that when combined together become something very dangerous....so dangerous that you won't be able to stop thinking about it.

ahem, anyways, so this recipe is easy to customize. You can make it whatever flavor you want. I made some cakes with cherry, and some with raspberry jam to add variety. All I did was instead of the cherry, I poured a little cake batter into the cups, scooped a little jam in the center and fill the rest of it with more cake batter....and then you get raspberry flavor cakes!
I want to try making more later with other flavors such as black sesame, ginger apricot, or green tea! The possibilities are endless!

I also made some truffles from Joy of Baking to put into the poka-dot heart box. Truffles are also easy to create your own flavors. The recipe gave easy ingredients such as espresso grounds, brandy, kahlua, Irish cream, raspberry jam, or orange peel, etc. (the possibilities are ALSO endless.....hmmm)

I decided to go with espresso flavor truffle covered in toasted almonds. Crunchy toasted flavored almonds with a little bitter coffee after taste...not bad of a combination. Quite tasty I must admit!

So that was a fun baking project. The packaging kits were great since I didn't try too hard to make the food look good. They look so cute as a whole that the actual food didn't even have to taste good.....Luckily the food wasn't too bad...at least that's what Dylan said. What a good boyfriend. :)

-Jean