Raspberry Hearts

I could not resist creating one last heart shaped, chocolate treat for my valentines. There is something about the combination of raspberries and chocolate that I just adore. Something about the tartness of the raspberries and the bitter notes of the chocolate all wrapped up in a sweet morsel. I can’t resist. I ended up baking a raspberry cookie, I wanted to utilize the natural raspberry, pink color, and decorating it with bittersweet chocolate.

Ingredients:

1 cup Raspberries
1 cup Butter
2/3 cup Sugar
1 Egg
2 2/3 cups Flour
4 oz bittersweet baking Chocolate for decorating

Directions:

Puree the raspberries or cook the raspberries in a small sauce pan with a couple tbsp of water. Cook them down until they have fallen apart, and have generated some liquid. If you cook your raspberries you have the option of straining out the raspberry seeds. Allow your raspberries to cool for a few minutes if you do cook them.
Cream together the butter and sugar.
Gradually beat in the raspberries.
Beat in the egg.
Beat in the flour.
Chill the dough for a couple of hours. Divide the dough into two portions. It will be really soft, so wrap each half up tight in parchment paper or plastic wrap, and nudge it into a flat disk, it will be a good starting point for when you later roll it out.
Preheat your oven to 400 F (~204 C).
Roll out your dough, one half at a time, leaving the remaining half in the refrigerator as you work. The dough will still be pretty soft. I find it easiest to roll it out between two pieces of parchment or wax paper since too much flour will discolor your purply-pink dough.
Cut out your hearts, and place them on greased or lined baking sheets.
Bake them for 10-12 minutes. For these cookies, you want to give them a hard bake all of the way through.
Melt your chocolate in a double boiler, and pipe the chocolate over the cooled cookies, or if you are looking for a simpler method you can simple dip the cookies directly into the melted chocolate.
Allow the cookies to dry fully before storing them.