Hearts

Oh goody, Valentine's Day gave me an excuse to make more cut-out cookies...



The light here is not very good... Is the shot blurry? I don't think so. The focus was on the front-most hearts. Still, I wish the Canon photo-management software could give me a value for camera shake on each photo I take. It gives me all the shooting info, a histogram to show the proportions of dark and light in the photo, and where the focus was. But no info on blurriness. And unless there's text, I don't always know if a shot is blurry or not.

It makes a big difference to move nearer to the window.



I like the depth of field in this shot. Front and back hearts are blurry, middle ones are in focus (I hope). The photo was taken with the widest aperture possible with our current (kit) lens, 3.5.

The cookies came out a little puffy. Funny thing is the new recipe I tried, from Cook's Illustrated, touted a special "reverse creaming" mixing technique to avoid puffiness, and I applied it as carefully as possible. Well I've never had a problem with puffy cut-out cookies, and this time I did! But I've also never used so much butter in a cookie recipe...

Here too the lighting was electrical, from an overhead lamp, so not very interesting. But at least I was able to avoid using a flash.

I had fun drawing on the cookies with melted chocolate. I used to have trouble getting the right consistency of chocolate to do that, but with my exercises in tempering I've learned you have to have a very light touch when melting chocolate so it doesn't get too thick or lumpy. For instance, melt over small quantity of water, and turn off heat well before chocolate is melted.

I also wrote some personalized messages on very large hearts. They came out well, but it would be a bit embarrassing to publish these.

Pink Santas was the closest I could get to a Valentine's Day-themed box.

Oh, and by the way, the cookies were good, though a bit too rich for my taste.