Household Ways: St. Valentine's Day Treats

Showing posts with label St. Valentine's Day Treats. Show all posts

Valentine's Day Ideas from Household Ways

Heart-shaped Cupcakes

Heart Pizza

Pink Sugar-rimmed Pink Lemonade

Heart Hot Dogs and Carrots

Peanut Butter Heart Apple

Cherry Heart Tarts

Stained Glass Window Cookies

which can be made into a secret decoder

St. Valentine's Day Meringue Cupcake Cones

Pink Lemonade Pound Cake

source

1 (18.25 ounce) package lemon cake mix
1 (3 ounce) package instant lemon pudding mix
4 eggs
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup pink lemonade concentrate
4 drops pink or red food color, optional

Glaze:
1 cup frozen pink lemonade concentrate, thawed
1/2 cup white sugar

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour one 10-inch tube pan or bundt pan.
Combine the cake mix, lemon pudding mix, eggs, vegetable oil, 1/2 cup lemon concentrate and the milk. Mix until smooth. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.
Bake at 350 for 50 minutes to 1 hour.
Remove from oven and prick cake all over with a fork. Immediately pour lemonade glaze over top of cake.
Let cake stand in pan until almost cool.
Make glaze by combining the remaining thawed frozen lemonade and the white sugar. Mix thoroughly and pour over still warm cake.
Source: Sugar Baby Aprons

Saint Valentine's Day Lunch

Hot dog hearts and heart carrots...

heart peanut butter apples...

even the hearts taken out of the apples!

Hugs, Kisses and Hearts Pancakes for the Ones You Love

This batter (recipe from Cooking with my Kid) is nice for this type of pancake because it is thin and can go through the narrow opening of a squirt bottle so you can "draw" whatever shapes you would like. Squirt bottles can be found at craft stores, and the cooking department of department stores. It is often with the candy making supplies.

2 cups all purpose or whole wheat flour or a mixture
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
2 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
2 tablespoons butter (melted) or vegetable oil

Preheat your griddle on medium heat. In a medium bowl, whisk together dry ingredients. Set aside. In a large bowl whisk together wet ingredients. Combine wet and dry being careful not to over mix. Throw some water on the griddle. If it sizzles, it is ready. Turn down the heat to medium-low and grease the griddle with cooking spray. Use a squirt bottle to place the pancake batter onto the griddle forming X, O and heart shapes. Wait until you see bubbles before you flip the pancake. Pancakes are done when they are golden brown.

If you want to make the heart within a heart shape, make the outline first, let them cook until they need to be filpped and flip them over. Fill in the middle with new batter and cook until the edge is done. Flip one more time to lightly cook the center.

Heart Tarts for St. Valentine's Day

This sweet idea comes from the very talented Jill at Meet the Dubiens. She has many precious ideas for making every day special.

2 pie crusts, either homemade or thawed frozen store bought
1 can cherry pie filling
1 egg white, beaten
red sugar, for decorating

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Either roll out your freshly-made pie dough or remove thawed store-bought pie crusts from their aluminum shell and place on a piece of parchment paper and smooth out. Using a heart-shaped cookie cutter, start cutting out hearts. Two pie shells should make 5-6 heart pies (which is 10 hearts top and bottom).

Place your bottom hearts on a baking sheet. Carefully spoon some cherry pie filling in the centre. Do not overfill. Try to stay at least 1/2 inch from the edge. If you overfill, the contents will seep out.

Place the remaining 5 hearts on top. I found that if you brush the pies with egg wash now, your pie crust will be a little more supple when you crimp the edges, and after it bakes it will have a golden finish.

See how I overfilled this heart and it is leaking out a little.

Using a fork, press down on all edges to make a tight seal. This is very important. If the seal is not tight, all the cherry pie filling will leak out while baking.

Sprinkle with red sugar if desired. Bake at 375 F for about 17 minutes, or until golden.

A heart tart for someone you love.

Happy St. Valentine's Day.

Secret Message Decoder Cookies

Having a house full of boys, sometimes it is hard to know what will please them for Valentine's day. Many things they feel are too girly. These cookies, however, appeal to boys as well as girls. These are a version of the stained-glass cookies I made here. I have also seen them versions of them several places on the blogosphere (Suzie J and Family Fun to name a few.)

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour, plus more for dusting

1/4 teaspoon table salt

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 stick (8 Tablespoons) unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (If I am using cherry candies, almond extract instead compliments it well.)

About 50 assorted clear colored hard candies such as Lifesavers or

Parchment paper

Two heart-shaped cookie cutters. One big, and one small.

Cream butter and sugar on medium speed until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add eggs; beat until smooth, 1 minute.

Mix together flour and dry ingredients in a separate bowl, and slowly add to butter mixture. Stir in flavoring extract. Place mixing bowl in refrigerator for at least 45 minutes. Don’t skip this step as it keeps the dough from melting and losing shape.

Meanwhile, unwrap the candies, and place candies in a plastic bag, and begin hammering it with a mallet.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Remove cookie dough from refrigerator, and roll out to 1/4-inch thickness. This is a bit of a sticky dough so use plenty of flour to keep the dough from sticking. It does make rolling it out repeatedly easier.

Use the large hearts to cut the cookies. Using a spatula, move the cut cookies to a parchment-lined baking sheet, about 1 inch apart. Once the cookies are on the baking sheet, use the smaller heart to cut out the space for the candies. Sprinkle broken candies into centers, being careful not to let the candies lay on top of your cookies, which may be easier said than done if you have little ones helping you.

You can either cook the baby hearts, or use them to roll out more dough for cookies.

If your dough is particularly soft and you do have that kind of space in your refrigerator, you can put the baking sheet into the refrigerator to chill the dough for about 15 minutes, but I never do and they come out fine. Perhaps necessary in hot/damp climates.

Place baking sheet in oven, and cook for about 8-10 minutes. The trick is not to let the cookies brown, as the stained glass windows will turn out bubbly and not clear. I know it is hard to fight that instinct.

Check your cookies half-way through. If a few cookies do not have enough candy to reach the edges of the cookies, just add a few more pieces of candy to the centers, and they melted very fast with the rest of the candy.

Now, here is the fun part. The part that appeals to boys. Make a message. Any kind of message. But write it with a light-blue fine point marker. Then, using orange, red, and pink markers write all over the message and the rest of the paper. Make doodle shapes, scribbles, or words. Make sure you doodle right over your secret message because when you take one of your red centered heart cookies, they will become a decoder cookie and will reveal your secret message and everything else will disappear!

photo from Family Fun

How cool is that?

Homemade Conversation Hearts

I found this tutorial on how to make your own Conversation Hearts, and I knew immediately that I had to try it. They were surprisingly easy to make and you can make them to your own tastes. You can make them any colors you like, any flavors you like and write on them whatever you want, including personalizing some for the loves of your life.

To make your own Conversation Hearts, you will need:
1/2 cup water
2 tsps. light corn syrup
1 packet of unflavored gelatin
2 pounds powdered sugar, plus a little more for dusting
variety of food colors and extracts

Mix water and the light corn syrup to the of unflavored gelatin until the gelatin is well-distributed. Microwave the mix for 30 seconds to dissolve the gelatin, stir well.

Add gelatin mixture to a mixing bowl along with 1 cup of powdered sugar. Mix ingredients using the paddle attachment (you can also use a handheld mixer). When the sugar is well blended you will add another cup of powdered sugar and mix until well-blended again. Continue this process until you have added 2 lb of powdered sugar. The dough should be stiff at this point.

Next you will knead the sticky dough on a generously-dusted powdered sugar surface. Roll the dough over itself adding powdered sugar as needed to decrease the stickiness. A word to the wise,
the dough hardens up pretty quickly, so you want it to be a little sticky or it will become too crumbly by the end of rolling it out. We added a bit too much sugar to ours.

Now you can add color and flavoring. We separated our dough into four balls for the four different colors and flavors we used. We added the color first, lightest color first, and then we added the flavoring extracts using what we had on hand (vanilla, almond, cinnamon and peppermint) but the possible extracts you could use are endless.

Finally you roll your dough and cut out your hearts using smallest cutters you have. You can make as thick as you like but since your cutter will most likely be larger than the store bought variety, you may want to it out a bit thinner.