MamaWriters are excited to host my friend and debut Regency author Susan Gee Heino.  She’s fabulous, funny, and her 2008 Golden Heart ® winning book Mistress By Mistake, just released yesterday from Berkley.  Lucky readers!  So please help us welcome Susan!

Love, Food and Thumb Prints on the Cookies

mistress-by-mistakeLove. Food. How often do we use those words together? Well, in my little world, it’s pretty much all the time. I love food.

I’m not a “foodie” exactly, but I do love to eat. And I’ve learned that unless you can afford to eat out all the time, if you want to eat you need to learn to cook. And if you’re going to cook, why not cook something good?

But then my editor emails with a big pile of revisions or my agent calls with some wonderful suggestions on a project and next thing you know, I have no time left to whip up something tantalizing. It’s spaghetti at the Heino house again.

So naturally, we’re all pretty thrilled that the holiday season is in full swing. Yum—non-stop food all around us, and it’s somethi®ng other than pasta with Ragu dumped on it! Drool.

We love food. We need food. We enjoy food. Food brings us together. Even characters in romance novels sit down to eat food from time to time. It’s an important part of life.

Trouble is, I write about people in a time period that’s been gone for 200 years. I can’t very well have my English Regency lord sit down to green-chili tacos and a plate of hot wings, can I? Answer: No, I can’t. (That leaves out Ragu, too. Darn.)

The food we eat is very much tied to our culture, our geography and our time. In MISTRESS BY MISTAKE my hero and heroine have a sort of running joke about strawberries. Because of secret scandal in the past, strawberries come to represent love for these people. Hey, makes perfect sense to me. I’ll gladly admit that I’ve often spelled love M-O-O-S-E-T-R-A-C-K-S.

So, with the holiday’s surrounding us and all the trimmings that go with it, what will you and your family be serving up that says L-O-V-E?kitchen-mess

For my kids, this would be “Sugar Joys”. It’s a cookie recipe of my own invention (as much as anyone can invent a cookie recipe) and my kids know I make it just for them. (My daughter’s name is Joy, by the way.) Now, if you promise to bake them with love and let the kids help, I’ll share the recipe.

3 cups sugar

2 sticks softened butter

2 tsp vanilla

4 eggs (beat separately)

4 ½ cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

¼ tsp salt

3 tblspn colored non-pareils

3 tblspn large granule decorative sugar

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees F. In small bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt. In larger bowl, beat sugar and butter until fluffy. Add vanilla and eggs, blend well. Slowly add flour mixture until dough is smooth and creamy. Add non-pareils.

Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Roll in decorative sugar. Place 2 inches apart on cookie sheet and press down twice with thumb, leaving heart-shaped imprint. Bake for 10 minutes. Makes 5 dozen sparkly, polka-dotted, heart-marked cookies. Aww, isn’t that sweet?