Any excuse will do

I don't need much prompting to bake something. Valentine's Day is as good a day as any to spend in the kitchen instead of the craft room. So while I stuff my face with iced sugar cookies, I'll just post some pics of my day's accomplishment (which, you'll be happy to know, will not include pics of my ever widening arse, an inevitable by-product of the baking that goes on in my kitchen time and time again).

These are not my own recipes. Although i do not enjoy watching Alton Brown, I do tend to follow his advice. So these are his sugar cookies and the cream cheese filling I used comes from the Food Network also.

So I won't bore you with any superfluous how-to's. You can hop on over to the Food Network site and get the recipes you need.

The recipe takes traditional sugar cookies and makes sandwich cookies with cream cheese filling out of them. They are delicious and a nice contrast to traditional sugar cookies with butter cream frosting. So I made both kinds for some variety.

Since these cookies are intended as gifts for family and friends, the crowning touch is the final packaging. I got some plastic candy bags at JoAnn today with a Valentine's theme. It pays to wait til the last minute to shop for seasonal stuff. All Valentine's stuff was on sale 50-70% off today.

I made heart-shaped bookmarks for each of the recipients, an idea I got from Helena at Craft and Creativity through Pinterest, attaching each one with a ribbon around the bag.

I put about a half dozen cookies in each bag. Now I'm off to deliver my Valentines.

Happy Valentine's Day ya'll.