What a pain in the patootie!!! I added about 1/3 cup flour total and it never firmed up in the fridge, so I put it in the freezer. I'd reach in and grab a handful and work as fast as I could before the dough started to "melt" and stick to my counter. Used lots of flour for rolling too. There are many that don't look much like hearts, but they baked up nice. DH says they taste good...I can't try any until tomorrow because I'm low carbing and tomorrow is a planned carb day(then back on plan). If DS, DIL and kids could stay all day I would have the kids ice and decorate them, but they'll only be here a short time so they can get on the road before dark(they're 90 minutes away in the Twin Cities). So, as soon as they finish cooling I'll throw some pink icing on them and call it good(well, maybe some chocolate icing too). I think I need a different cookie recipe...I don't want to fight with this stuff again! Thanks for the help, Ladies!

Butter would change the taste a bit, but the texture is more of my issue with butter, I think. Now sour cream? That might be an avenue to explore, we had cattle and so we always had milk, cream or sour cream, that very well may have been in there. Grandma's old sour cream cookie recipe called for 1/4 cup of shortening and 1/2 cup of sour cream, but I used that recipe and added pineapple and it wasn't it. I think I'll try yours, Judy, as posted, and see if it's close. If so, then I can play with it, so thanks again, it's a whole new avenue to explore! Annie

About 10% of my dishes are flops in one way or another. Fish course for SWMBO's surprise dinner was kind of floppy. Indifferent cod is not greatly improved with hollandaise sauce. Cooking bacon on the gas grill was a flop. Too much grease and flareups, result was 2 lb of bacon that tasted like a house fire. Come to think of it, much of the stuff I make on the grill is a flop. I just don't ''get'' grilling, and probably lack the patience for a two-level approach. My experiment with sweet sauce on halibut was a flop. Tried making a hazelnut sauce, didn't know how so ended up basically making a custard suitable for hazelnut ice cream. SWMBO said, thoughtfully and gently, ''well, this would have been really good ice cream . . . '' When I first started simmering fish for a Japanese-style dish, I thought that it was like meat - longer simmering at lower temperature would make for the tenderest fish. Silly. Ended up with fish-flavoured rubber. Learned that less is more. Now I simmer fish for at most 3 minutes. So far all of my attempts at xiao long bao (dumplings filled with broth) have been floppy. I don't have ''the touch'' when pleating the dumpling skins, end of pinching them too hard resulting in dense, tough pleats. The broth is tasty but you have to gnaw through the pleats to get at it. I am determined to persevere. Last holiday, I spent untold hours (days, actually) making aspic for a big dinner. I liked it, but some guests looked askance at jiggling cubes of meat jelly. Some of it ended up being recycled into soup broth, which is a disappointing reward for that much work. Along the same lines, there is a soup I've had in Taiwan which is sort of aspic, cubes of jellied meat broth that stand up in little piles on the bowl, but are perfectly calibrated to dissolve into scrumptious soup as soon as it touches your warm tongue. I've not succeeded in making that. I think I can, but will need to get the consistency just right. So far, I end up chewing my soup which is Just Not Right. I went through a phase of bringing home and cooking up various organs and other peculiar animal parts. Hearts, kidneys, tongues, livers, spleens, tendons, necks. Cost me the trust of my children that summer. For months they would interrogate me on the precise nature and source of any meat dish. You'd think I was serving the family cat or something. Oddly, I have a hard time making fluffy rice without a rice cooker. I know, it is supposed to be simple to make on the stovetop, but I get impatient and peek/stir/sample too much, resulting in pasty, mushy rice. The first time I made tomato pesto (pesto a la trapanese) I used a food processor. Results looked like stomach contents after a college drink-fest. I learned you have to hand-chop it, or have a much lighter touch on the button. Broiling is a fertile source of floppery. When 15 seconds makes the difference between perfect and burned, and you have to sit on the floor in front of an open oven door to monitor, well, sometimes I end up dumping a half sheet pan of stuff into the trash and starting over. And on and on. If you're not flopping, you're not trying!

Cathy, this is SO easy, but it's time consuming. I love it because it candies the rind and it's not bitter at all. Also, you can change up this recipe with different kinds of citrus. I made a lemon and Key lime version this past weekend! Anna's Orange Marmalade Recipe source: Ina Garten "At Home" (I think) 4 large oranges 2 lemons 8 cups water 8 cups sugar Wash citrus and cut in half from "pole to pole". Cut citrus in very thin slices, being sure to remove the seeds. Place citrus slices and any juice in a heavy-bottomed sauce pot. Add 8 cups of water and bring citrus & water to a boil. Remove from heat and add sugar; stir till dissolved. Place lid on sauce pot and leave citrus mixture to sit over night. The next day, bring citrus mixture back to a boil; reduce temperature and simmer uncovered for 2 hours, stirring regularly. After 2 hours, bring back up to a steady boil, stirring continually, for *30 minutes or until reaching gel stage. Ladle mixture into prepared jars and process in a BWB for 10 minutes. * Sometimes it doesn't take the exact 30 minutes at the end to come to gel stage. I guess it just depends on the water content of the fruit, moisture in the air, etc. I've had mine gel at 20 minutes or less, so just use good judgement.