Typographic Project: Edible Valentine Type: Love & Kisses

This series of typographic cookies was inspired by my research on Mexican pan dulce – the idea is based on a particular variety of pan dulce [‘sweet bread’] called besos [‘kisses’], which are especially popular in Mexico for Valentine’s Day.

The idea was then expanded further into a typographic feast in 5 languages (English, Spanish, Slovene, Italian, German) using the words ‘kisses’ and ‘love’ as the basis for this project (the final result is the last image below). Furthermore, my project of edible type coincided with the Valentine theme set out to celebrate the first anniversary of Type Tasting led by Sarah Hyndman of With Relish – for Type Tasting’s review of my project click here.

Recipes

4 different kinds of recipes were used for these cookies:

• Besos from Tennie Cakes – Besos are not cookies per se, but pan dulce, a sort of sweet scorn-like breads.

• Shortbread from BBC – Shortbread was shaped into letters by hand. Some letters were further dipped into a melting chocolate to give some colour to the type and sprinkled with icing sugar and chopped up hazelnuts. The recipe for these world’s famous biscuits, which originated in Scotland, is exceptionally good – in my opinion, it is in a high competition with the famous brand, Walkers Shortbread. For European readers – caster sugar, known in the States as ‘superfine’ sugar, is a British term for sugar with small grains that are between granulated and icing sugar. If you cannot find caster sugar, use ordinary white sugar rather than icing sugar. Your food mixer will do the rest!

• Jam-filled butter biscuits from BBC – A classic British recipe for Jammie Dodgers and a perfect one to sandwich ‘red’ jam between the two hearts. Again, my variation of the recipe came out to be more ‘Central European’ in appearance to make the type more diverse when assembled! Traditionally, Jammie Dodgers have a shape (e.g. heart) cut out on the top layer so that the jam is visible through it like in the BBC recipe, but, instead, I decided to make a template of the heart and lettering, placed on the top layer and then sprinkled in icing sugar.

• Chocolate truffles from BBC – Very simple but incredibly delicious truffles – I had to keep them away from many long fingers before I managed to finish with photographing the project! It is worth using good quality chocolate (70%). For the decoration, the truffles were sprinkled with unsweetened cocoa powder, chopped up hazelnuts and coconut powder.

The making of edible Valentine type

The cookies were either shaped into type before they were baked, but in most cases they were assembled into type after the baking and then photographed.

When all letters were finally assembled in Photoshop into two words in 5 languages, the final outcome was a very satisfying typographic Valentine feast that fed my family for a few days!