Valentine cookies

I made some simple chocolate, strawberry and vanilla wafers yesterday with some friends for Valentine's Day (which is quite the excuse, I just wanted to use up the extra unsalted butter and flour sitting in my room at the dorm lol).

My friend suggested making "naruto" cookies shaped like naruto fish cakes (the little white slices with a pink swirl, it's used as a topping for hot noodles a lot in Japan) but sadly I did not roll out the dough thin enough to make a proper swirl. They aren't as elegant as we'd like but they were delicious nonetheless. Tonight I'll be handing them out to some friends who missed the baking yesterday.

A hint for the strawberry wafers: All I did was replace cocoa powder with strawberry jam in a normal chocolate wafer recipe, and added a drop of red food coloring. Oh, and I also doubled the amount of cocoa and strawberry for the dough by accident but they turned out MUCH better that way!

Felt Brooches/Pins

Here's some pins/brooches that I mentioned before! The embroidery is a pattern that is sewn onto kid's kimono collars as a protective charm. Maybe these pins will keep the wearer safe from harm. :)

They are made with felt, embroidery floss, and czech seed beads. The green one also uses recycled canvas from myself and fellow students at my university from making our own stretched canvases for painting. You never know when stuff like that will come in handy!

Japanese Embroidery

I've been going back to the embroidery I learned from my mom lately, thanks to a recent school project. I tried making a simple video for that project of me stitching a sample card of a semamori charm. A real semamori is stitched to your clothes though, this one was just made as a reference, and the video made an interesting intro for my presentation. :)

Untitled from Mikako Takai on Vimeo.

I've tried making some brooches/pins with this method too. I'll be uploading them soon!