Ten Things That Make My Heart Beat Faster

Last year, the lovely Jessica over at Chronically Vintage wrote a post entitled 'Ten Things That Make My Heart Beat Faster', which was in turn based on a 1956 interview with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor in Good Housekeeping magazine.

In celebration of St Valentine's Day, I've done my own version, which I present to you below. It was tough, I can tell you, and I had to leave a lot out and stop before I got carried away. If I did it again in a week's or even a day's time, different things would probably come to my head first and it would be an almost entirely different list. But I can say that, tough as it was, it made me very happy in the process of thinking of all the things that lift my spirits, quicken my heart, make my breath catch in my throat and bring a smile to my lips.

In my usual St Valentine's Day fashion, I've aimed to make it all inclusive, picking things that hopefully everyone, including those without an individual person to call their Valentine, can identify with and enjoy... unless they happen to be a dog person...

Happy Valentine's Day, one and all.

Love, Sweet Love

I made treats for Valentine's Day! Long-time readers who remember my Valentine's post last year may be surprised by this. But, if you remember, I am not at all opposed to the tradition of Valentine's Day, but rather the commercial and predictable event it has become. I'm a total Romantic, and I love the idea of taking someone by surprise and professing your undying affection. I love the idea of people selecting or making special, personal gifts and sharing their true feelings. But the disheartening sight of desperate, sweating men crammed into shops buying tacky cards and regulation roses does not speak to my Romantic heart.

I also dislike that Valentine's Day seems to stop at people in established couples these days. Love is so much more than that. What about love between friends and family - the relationships that often last longer than romantic ones? What about sharing joy with acquaintances that are neglected in love and friendship? What about smiling at and conversing with strangers? What about finding the beauty in unexpected places and falling back in love with the world?

So, this year, I opted to share the love far and wide. Well, within the walls of my office, anyway... So I baked lots of biscuits for everyone! I adore cherries - they're the fruity love of my life - so they were a natural choice for my sweet treats. Cherry pie is my favourite, and I was considering making more cup pies, as I did for Halloween, but wanted something a little less fiddly and which could go further. So biscuits it was.

Cherry and chocolate biscuits

Ingredients:

• 1 cup icing sugar
• 250g butter
• 2 teaspoon maraschino cherry juice
• 1/2 teaspoon almond essence
• 2 1/4 cups plain flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup maraschino cherries, drained and chopped (I used black cherries in syrup, as I couldn't find maraschino ones)
• large chocolate chips

• Combine sugar, butter, cherry juice and almond essence. Blend well. 
• Add flour and salt. Mix well. 
• Add cherries. Mix well.
• Shape into 1" balls. Place 2" apart on a biscuit tray covered with greaseproof paper. 
• Bake at 180C for 8-10 minutes. 
• Immediately after baking, top each biscuit with a chocolate chip, pressing down firmly. Remove from tray and cool on wire rack.

Yes, I am dressed in a Valentine-cooking-appropriate red dress with a little heart pattern...

I failed to get a picture of the finished product (apart from the one at the top of this post). They took much longer than the stated time to cook... I think that maybe my oven isn't the greatest though. I bake so infrequently that I'm not aware of its quirks and how I might need to compensate for them.

In the end, the biscuits didn't come out looking quite as appetising as I had hoped and I wasn't overly delighted by the overall result - I feel I would have preferred just munching on cherries! I think dark chocolate would have been a better option than milk chocolate but I couldn't find dark buttons, sadly. But the biscuits went down well at work, and that's the important thing. I =got to share the love and subtly make my point that Valentine's Day shouldn't just be for couples. 

I also got so carried away with my loved-up enthusiasm that I created a Valentine's Day mix, for your listening pleasure. Not much thought went into this, I must confess, I just cast an eye over my itunes library and pulled out a few songs... Or rather, as it ended up, more than a few songs... I opted to throw in friends, love lost, unrequited love, innocent love, less innocent love and "other", just to cover a greater spectrum of experiences and circumstances. And it all kicks off with the worldwide love that inspired this post title, and which I was humming to myself all day today. Click below to enjoy! (And yes, the cover of my compilation is inspired by the fact that my excitement continues to mount over the upcoming Lichtenstein exhibition...)

Valentine's Day from lisamariemac on 8tracks Radio.