21 May Olive Oil & Sea Salt Brownie Cookies

These cookies are not new to Butterlust. I posted the recipe last August – just a couple short months after I began experimenting with a DSLR camera (HELLO, iPhone photos!). And while I’m still a photo-novice (so much to learn!), it’s pretty easy to recognize that there is some serious ‘room for improvement’ from my last photos.

Especially because this recipe is the bombdotcom. For real, it’s one the best recipes on this blog, but it gets very little love because, well, food porn is important.

It’s something I struggle with a lot. I’ve posted some great recipes with really terrible photos. I’d love to shoot and reshoot half the recipes on this blog. Or would I? Are those old, novice iPhone photos evidence of a food blogger right of passage, of sorts? Should they stick around, at the back of the metaphorical interwebs closet, very public proof of the progress I’ve made over the last year and a half?

But then what about the recipes? Do they feel all mopey and neglected because my baby blogger self hadn’t gone all photo happy yet? Don’t they deserve proper visual representation?

Herein lies my predicament.

And since there are about five trillion recipes I still want to bake, reshoots probably won’t happen very often. Maybe with the recipes that get made several times a year, like these Olive Oil & Sea Salt Brownie Cookies, or this Zucchini Bread, but the majority of those crappily shot recipes will stay that way.

And that’s probably for the best. When I’m having a hard-on-myself day — feeling like my photos aren’t good enough or all sad because I’ll never be The Pioneer Woman –– I’ll look back and remember back when I shot under the yellowy bulbs of my parents’ kitchen with my iPhone 4 and, at least for a hot second, feel damn proud of all the work I’ve done.

These are friend-making cookies. Right around the time I posted the recipe last August – 2 months into Steve and my relationship – I took a double batch to a party that his friends were throwing. I wanted to make a good impression, the owner of the house was roasting a WHOLE PIG for cheese’s sake. Needless to say they were a huge hit, and have been requested for every.single.party.since.

When our friends Emma & Dana (notice I said our) asked me to make a couple dozen for their nursing school graduation party (congrats ladies!), I couldn’t resist pulling out the ole’ Canon and snapping a few new photos. Because I really don’t like the old ones. And you can never have too much practice shooting chocolate cookies. Really – chocolatey, amorphous desserts are a food blogger’s biggest challenge. Chocolate never tastes bad, but boy does it look like poop on camera. Literally.

So thanks for letting me practice my skillz on you – hope you like the improved photos. And as if twice isn’t enough, I’m throwing around the idea of re-reshooting them again in a year as a way to track my improvement.

CLICK HERE for the recipe (and to see the original photos).

XO, Katie

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