Valentine's Day Dinner

Heyhey !
Did you have a nice Valentine's Day? I had a wonderful one! Being on garden leave meant that I had enough time to make a lovely dinner for the bf and decorate a bit too. Up until now, we usually went out for dinner or cooked something fairly simple after a long day at the office, but this was my chance. Of course I went completely over the top as I tend to do, but it turned out wonderful :)

In the morning I got up and I found these wonderful flowers waiting for me from the bf. Arent they lovely?

Then the preparations started. The usual things like tidying, shopping for more food (even though I really thought I had everything already), and cooking. After about 3 hrs of cooking, I had result :) Sadly hardly any time for beautification but I quickly threw on a dress to make it a little bit celebratory. No pics of me then today ;) So this is what I made for Valentine's Day:

I bought the bf some pressies: I bought him two bottles of his favourite ale and Valentined them up a bit, and I also got him a book which I wrapped in Christmas paper (for lack of better) and stuck on some cardstock hearts. I think it looks cute :)

The bottles I wrapped in pink tissue paper leftover from the votive candle holders, and added cardstock ribbon and hearts on both bottles and the bottle caps. The arrows I made for something else actually as seen later in this post but I had some spare so they came in handy.

As an aperirif we had caviar on blinis. Not to worry, this is the cheapo stuff but it is still yummy. I used a cookie cutter to make heart shapes of the caviar. The black ones worked better than the pink though. I loved how this came out!

See how wonderful our table looked? I used the coffee table as it was way too messy in the kitchen for a romantic dinner but it seemed to work. Of course you can see the votives in the background also :)

As a starter I made Artichoke Hearts with Smoked Salmon. Easy and quite tasty, though it got a little messy when I dropped the entire bowl of sauce and the kitchen was covered. Note: if you make this dish, you really only need about 1/8th of the amount explained in the recipe! Luckily the bowl had just enough left for the both of us hihi.

This was the main course. Doesnt it look lovely?

This would be too much detail for a photo capture, but the main course consisted of:
'Kippenpasteitje' which I found on this amazing blog showing how to cook special Dutch food that I would have never thought possible of making :) Instead of the round pastry shown on the website, I used cookie cutters to make this heart shaped pastry after being inspired here.
The Ultimate Twice Baked Potato recipe came from allrecipes.com. This is yet another funny story as I bought 4 potatoes like the recipe said, only to find out when they came out of the oven that this was actually for 8 PEOPLE! So tonight we will be eating this again and and there are 4 more in the freezer ;)
The cherry tomato idea came from here, I just thought it was so cute! Of course mine look nowhere near as good as the original post, but the idea was there.

For dessert we had heart-shaped cherry pie which I filled way too full and turned out to be more like bleeding hears than anything else, but it was kind of fitting and not too cheesy so I guess that was ok. I added strawberries & cream as well though I used plain cream from a can, nothing fancy like in the recipe and the bf had to help me fill the strawberries.

See, nothing like the original but still so yummy!

I was so full after this, I couldnt move for like an hour. But I had fun making this and the great thing is that there are so many leftovers that we can eat the same again tonight :)

Oh yes, I also got a present of course. I got the Iron Man soundtrack and a book showing 1000 things to see and do in London. That should make for some more interesting London posts in the future :)

I hope you all had a lovely Valentine's as well, I certainly loved it and I think the bf did also :) Though I am totally in need of recovery from all that cooking!