I shunned the random number generator to make a holiday cookie in time for Valentine’s day — the Love Letters from p. 29.

These are a small, shaped cookies lightly flavored with orange and lemon, and “sealed” with candied cherry.

This dough required the pasty mixer! It doesn’t come out very often, but when it does, I’m so glad I have it. I had to cut the butter into the sugar and flour mixture.

At that point it’s very crumbly, and you bring it together with sour cream. And the orange and lemon zest is added for flavoring.

This is yet another roll-out dough that doesn’t require refrigeration, and I have to say I’m a refrigeration convert. (I’m not sure I was ever anti-refrigeration for roll-out cookies, I just never thought about how much different it is to roll them out without getting the butter nice and cold.)

Once rolled out to 1/8″ thick, they are cut into 3×2″ rectangles. Those rectangles are folded like little letters and then sealed with small pieces of candied cherries. I didn’t have candied cherries, so I rehydrated some dried ones and boiled them in sugar water for a little bit. Honestly, they would have been fine just rehydrated a little.

Finally a sprinkle of sugar (I used pink and red for Valentine’s Day), and into the oven.

These were very hard to roll out, and the zest was just not enough to flavor them. The recipe actually called for the “rind” not the zest, but I’m thinking that would have made them bitter. In the end, they mostly tasted of flour.

Bottom line: These were really cute — coming out like tiny, sealed letters. However, they were hard to roll out and not very flavorful. I could think of ways to tweak it and make it better (more flavor, for one), but it wouldn’t be worth my time.