I imagine this surprise was a thank you for the 3-course meal I slaved over the night before and have been planning for over a week.  Here are the recipes that inspired my menu along with the improvisations made along the way.

The Hamilton household’s Valentine’s Day menu for 2009

Crab meat, apple, and mango salad with cumin apple chips

• Salad recipe (Epicurious)
• Apple chips recipe (Epicurious)

I am not a fan of presentation that is difficult to eat.  The original recipe suggested a mille feuille layering of salad between giant slices of apple chip.  Instead, I opted to find the smallest red apples available on the market and stack the slices in a tower next to the salad (which were scooped into the half-shells of the mango used).  We ate our portions on a shared plate like we would nachos with salsa. An intimate way to kick-start a meal.

Beet-infused linguini with crab, grape tomatoes, garlic, and chili

• Original tagliatelle recipe (UKTV Food)

My hunt for a pasta roller in Vancouver did not produce results in time, so instead of making fresh tagliatelle stained scarlet with beet juice, I had to make do with “fresh” Olivieri linguini from the grocer downstairs.  Prelim tests with food colouring paste and gels prepped me for the fact that my pasta could only go pink with a 3 minute exposure.  When it was game time, I chopped up a beet and threw it into the salted pasta water rather than use non-natural dyes.  Besides, “beet-infused” sounds a hell of a lot better than “dyed with Spectrum Super Red 101210″.

I also had to give up the idea of tying the linguini into bundles of bows and cooking them that way.  Luckily, the pasta seemed amenable to being shaped into a heart – a pattern I replicated with the bits of Dungeness crab that I picked out from the finished pasta.  Pushed the grape tomatoes out to ring the dish, sprinkled parsley and squeezed the whole thing with some lemon, and a light, love-themed crab linguini was ready for consumption.

Red velvet cupcakes with cinnamon heart cookies

• Red velvet cupcake recipe (Epicurious)
• Cinnamon cookie recipe (Recipezaar)

I’m cutting it close for a submission to Nolwenn’s Cupcakes de l’amouuuur contest, but I hope this makes it in!  Car le concours à écrit en français au départ, voici un peu de français par hommage =)

This red velvet cupcake recipe is different from the one I used for my birthday cake last year, and I have to say that I prefer its lighter cocoa essence and more intense colour.  5 tablespoons of regular (watery) red food colouring was mixed with a few drops of Spectrum food colouring gel to achieve the scarlet I was going for.  The recipe makes just over 2 dozen cupcakes, so I baked the remainder in ramekins for the presentation I had in mind.

Cupcakes alone weren’t enough to finish this dessert; I also baked a dozen heart-shaped cinnamon cookies to spear into the ramekins. Replaced the typical vanilla frosting with softened french vanilla ice cream as requested by my husband.  The decadence of this dessert balanced the delicacy of the first two dishes nicely.

That was our Valentine’s Day.  Hope yours was just as lovely and sweet.