What's Cookin'? Blondie Bars and a Beary Lovely Valentines Card

What's Cookin' for Valentine's Day in your house? I've cooked up a "beary" cute card and tried a new bar cookie recipe last night.

I made some Valentine Blondies Bars that I found on Pinterest from https://ahelicoptermom.com/valentine-blondie-bars-recipe

for my Valentine Sampler Class tonight and tomorrow morning. I'll be posting about the Sampler with the next week.

True confession time! I made one mistake and accidentally added 1 teaspoon of baking soda instead of the 1/4 teaspoon, so my bars are more "poofy" than the bars in the recipe photo. The other thing I did was I only had Valentine Peanut M&Ms instead of just the Milk Chocolate Valentine M&Ms. But the good news is you can hardly taste the peanuts, the chocolate chips cover them up nicely. Of course, I had to try a couple to make sure they were edible for my guests. I give them 4.5 out of 5 stars due to my baking soda boo-boo.

I had so much fun creating this What's Cookin' Beary Lovely Valentine's Card for you! This card uses a wide variety of current and retired products, but I think it turned out so cute.

Do you get the greeting? A dash of kindness relates to the salt and pepper shaker. A spoonful of love relates to the spoon in the bowl. I thought that greeting went so well with my original card design.

The Baby Bear Stamp Set (Spring 2017) is retired. The set has three stamps to build the bear, but I only used two of the stamps. Crumb Cake ink for the base layer, and Soft Suede for the facial features.  I wanted to show some fur so I dusted off my very old Fiskars Deckle Edged Scissors to fussy cut around him. What do you think? Does he look furry?

To get that bowl full of hearts and the spoon "in" the bowl, I carefully cut about 3/4 of the way across the bowl just above the front stamped rim edge. After I added the spoon and a few hearts, I scotch taped on the back side of the bowl to hold it all together. Raised the bowl up with dimensionals as I set the bowl in front of the bear, then continued to add the mini hearts with mini dimensionals until I had a pleasant amount.

Here are the products I used to create this card:

CURRENT Products:

Basic White Thick cardstock for card base

Hand Penned Designer Series Paper for card front 

Stitched with Whimsy Dies

Tasteful Label Dies

Shimmery White cardstock for tag

What's Cookin' Stamp Set

Real Red Ink - bowl and tag

Cajun Craze Ink - salt and pepper shakers

Crumb Cake Ink - first layer of bear and spoon

Soft Suede Ink - facial features on bear

Die Cutting Machine

Paper Trimmer

Glue Dots

Dimensionals

Mini Dimensionals

RETIRED Products:

Baby Bear Stamp Set

Triple Heart Punch, use the smallest heart to fill the bowl

So Saffron striped Designer Series Paper

Love You Always Foil set

Real Red Foil

1/8" Whisper White Sheer Ribbon

Not a Stampin' Up Products:

Fiskars Deckle Edged Scissors (photo to help) originally from big box craft store long ago

The current products are available at my online store by clicking the yellow box link below. The retired products might be able to be found on eBay, Etsy, or other selling sites.

I'd love to read your comments about the bear card or if you tried the recipe. 

What do you think about both or either?

tinyurl.com/stampinwitheva

#stampinwitheva #sudemo