Hearthstone Cookies

Hearthstone graduated from beta yesterday with what seemed to me to be a relative lack of fanfare — perhaps it had already been scheduled to “go live” this week, but got overshadowed by the hullaballoo surrounding the unexpected opening of Warlords pre-orders and boosts to 90?

In honor of Hearthstone going live, I’ve made some edible Hearthstones!

I used Millya’s Unconjured Cinnamon Bun Frost Cookies recipe, with a few modifications. I used 1/2 teaspoon each of vanilla and almond extract instead of a full teaspoon of vanilla in the dough. I replaced the brown sugar in the filling with blue sugar crystal sprinkles, and I used finely chopped almonds instead of walnuts or pecans. I also left out the cinnamon and didn’t replace it with any other spice, though I considered using ginger or cardamom.

I suppose I’ll try Hearthstone eventually; for now, I have way too many things I want to do in WoW to allow myself to get distracted by another game — even if it’s from Blizzard and uses a lot of familiar concepts from WoW. The Hearthsteed mount is not, at this time, a lure; to me, it looks kind of wierd and freaky, and I’m content (for the moment) with my total mount count.

The Old Ladies may be thinking, “but Kam, didn’t you tell us on Saturday that you were giving up junk food, including cookies, for Lent?”. Well, yes, I did — I made an exception for these cookies because I’d been planning to do this for quite a while. I don’t literally observe Lent, anyway — Mormons celebrate Easter but don’t do the Fat Tuesday/Ash Wednesday/Lent/Good Friday thing. Although we have regular fast days on the first Sunday of every month, the concept of voluntarily abstaining from a luxury or indulgence of some kind for an extended period of time is still a good one. For some years now, my Mom and my sisters and (sometimes) I have chosen something to abstain from during Lent, using the Lenten season as a sort of way to supplement or reinvigorate our New Year’s Resolutions. One year, I chose just chocolate ice cream. During Lent, my ice cream consumtion as a whole — which was, at that point in my life, rather excessive — decreased, and afterward, I continued to be able to exercise more restraint. Hopefully, once these cookies are gone, I’ll still be able to resist junk food for the remaining time until Easter!