Chocolate Cardinals...

I was going to do a post about the wheat bread recipe I came up with last week. I had plenty of pictures to post with it, but then my Blackberry went haywire on me. I'd been using it to take pictures because it's always with me and it has a 5 mega pixel camera, which is almost as good as my regular camera. Plus I can just email them to myself as soon as I take the picture. But when the media card on the phone gets an error message and wipes out all of my pictures, I'm stuck. Oh well. I plan on making that bread again so I will take pictures and do a post on them.

During the 684 snowstorms we've had in Massachusetts this month, I've spent my snow days baking. I'm lucky enough to work in a library that closes when the weather's too bad. So last week we had a snow day after having one a few days earlier, so I didn't really need to bake anything else. Note I said "didn't really need to." I found an excuse to bake, and it was right outside my window.

I live in an area of Worcester that was ravaged by the Asian Longhorned Beetle, stupid bugs. After living on a tree lined street for all of three months, more than half of the trees in my neighborhood were chopped down because they were infested with the beetles. Luckily, I lost only 1/4 of the trees on my property (I had four). I have a crab apple tree in my backyard that attracts the birds in the area that need a place to rest, eat, and annoy some puppies. My Boston Terrier, Siena, loves to jump up on the bench seat in the dining room and bark at all the birds in the tree. Usually I see robins and chickadees. This time there were a bunch of cardinals in my tree, two males and five or six females. (I wish this picture was better, but it seemed like they knew I was taking their photo and moved every time I hit the button.) I saw these beautiful red birds and thought, "Ooh, I can finally use the copper bird cutter I got at KAF!"

So I set about making the cookies. BUT, since I had made regular sugar cookies twice in the past week, I wanted to try a chocolate cookie. And all I did was replace 1/2 c of the flour from the Betty Crocker recipe with cocoa powder. The cookies were pretty good, though they could have been sweeter, I'll have to play with it a little next time I want to make chocolate cookies.