Valentine’s Day Share-a-Heart – TWD #cookiesandkindness

It’s a beautiful thing you can make a bunch of these chocolate heart-shape cookies and give them to people you know or strangers you don’t. These delicious cookies from Dorie Greenspan are the perfect medium for sharing. Thanks Dorie for the phenomenal idea of a share-a-heart cookie. You can find her recipe here.

These are shortbread cookies made mostly with all-purpose flour and confectioners’ sugar. Cocoa powder gives them the chocolate flavor. Put all the dry ingredients in the food processor until the mixture are evenly blended. Then cut in cold pieces of butter until the mixture turns grainy, followed by an egg yolk and small amount of water. The batter comes together quickly after a few pulses. The hardest and time-consuming part of making the cookies is rolling out the dough and cutting them in heart shapes between sheets of parchment paper. But that’s also the fun and creative part of it. I had to resort to series of chilling and rolling before I finally finished with all the cookie dough.

You might be thinking about doing something special for people you love on Valentine’s day. Maybe it’s fitting to expand the circle of love to include random acts of kindness, sweetness and civility to people who happen to cross our paths each day. Delivery people, cashiers at the grocery stores, librarians, parking attendants…. A dear friend told me about a first-hand encounter of someone picking up her entire bill at a juice bar. She did not know who it was. But the act of kindness of a total stranger took her by surprise and has had a knock-on effect on her. I’m sure she shared that story with other friends. Clearly, it’s made an impression on me. The power of random kindness can be immense, if not contagious!

To see more of these valentine’s cookies created by other #cookiesandkindness bakers, please see the blogroll at Tuesdays with Dorie.

Use the hashtag #cookiesandkindness and tag @doriegreenspan to show your creations. Spread joy and create cookie memories for everyone you love.