Until I sat down to decorate these sugar cookies last weekend I’d forgotten how relaxing and enjoyable punching shapes out of dough and creating little royal icing designs can be. I’m usually more of a drop cookie person but I felt like making something really spring-like and cheerful and some brightly colored butterflies seemed to fit the bill. I found a great little butterfly cookie cutter at Michaels and – wouldn’t you know – the Wilton folks had printed a cookie recipe right on the back.

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These days we food-types like to jazz up our chocolate chip cookes with bacon, Jacques Torres disks and sea salt. Those are tasty variations, but I don’t know anyone who would dare pass up a big plate of the good ol’ Toll House original. It’s a true American icon. The Nestlé company licensed the recipe from the cookie’s inventor, Ruth Wakefield, and has printed it on bags of its Toll House morsels for decades. We don’t often look to the side of a food package for culinary greatness, but isn’t it interesting that it’s where many tried and true recipes actually came from?

Until recently I had all but completely ignored these on-the-package recipes. Why? Rarely does a photo accompany them and with the two inches of space most are allotted the directions tend to be scant. In other words, I couldn’t easily tell what I was getting myself into. One day recently I decided that it would be a fun project to take the leap and start “revealing” some of these recipes on a blog. Some, like the Toll House cookies, might be hidden gems. Others might be…well…better left on the package. Either way, on-the-package recipes will finally get the spotlight! I hope you’ll follow me on this adventure and subscribe to my updates.

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