Valentine Treat Experiments - The 2021 Version

Most of our holiday celebrating revolves around food, so it's no surprise that Valentine's Day provides a great opportunity for trying something new. Here's what looked intriguing to us this year - some very successful, others not so much.

We discovered freeze-dried strawberries recently, so when I saw a suggestion to add them to chocolate chip cookies, I just had to try it myself. To make them extraordinary, I followed the suggestion to use dark chocolate and dip and drizzle them in more dark chocolate. That's totally not necessary, but it does make them a bit fancier for guests and gifts.

I used one-half of our regular recipe for the dough and added 3/4 cup of freeze-dried strawberries (lightly broken) along with 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips (although half of that was "dust" leftover from a previous experiment). Then I melted regular chocolate chips for the "dip and drizzle" step. Delicious!

The next recipe that begged to be tried was Chocolate Strawberry Truffle Brownies. Wouldn't that pique your tastebuds as well? Bake your regular brownie recipe, then top with a mixture of melted chocolate chips, cream cheese and strawberry jam. Drizzle chocolate ganache on top of that and store in the refrigerator.

I used this brownie recipe, baking it in two 8"-square pans. I had a 4-ounce cube of cream cheese already opened in the refrigerator, so I melted 1/2 cup of chocolate chips and mixed the two together. Because we had raspberry and not strawberry jam already opened, I decided to go with a raspberry version, and mixed 2 1/2 tablespoons of jam, along with a tablespoon of powdered sugar, into the chocolate mixture. That went on one of the brownie pans.

For the other pan of brownies, I used the leftovers from our February macaron experiment, frosting the top with the creamy filling and sprinkling that with the broken cookies turned into crumbs.

Oh, one last new one for this year - Holiday Popcorn. What should we try next year?