Kids like to get the sweet stuff more than the other stuff.
Valentine’s Day is a great day to allow your kids to share in being creative with baking… so here are some Valentine Cookie and Cupcake ideas that ooze with love and fresh baked goodness.
photo credit: therouxdown
Let’s start with the cookies.
For kids, baking is fun. It is a way for them to help out in the kitchen and learn love cooking. The freezer section of the grocery store has several flavors of cookies. Rolled dough is good to use and eliminates cleanup hassles after the cookies are made.
Take a roll of refrigerated dough and roll it out on a non-stick surface. Add a touch of flour to the rolling pin before you try to roll the dough or it will stick. Younger kids may find it easier to roll the dough out with a plastic rolling pin because they are not as heavy as the wooden ones.
Heart Shaped Cookie Cutters will turn regular sugar, peanut butter, and chocolate chip cookies into creations of love. Kids don’t only like hearts.
Let them experiment with other shapes in the cookie cutter arsenal if they want to. They can even design shapes of their own with the dough pieces that are too small to cut.
Cute Valentine Cupcake Ideas
Cupcakes are much the same way but it takes a bit more preparation.
To make it easy, use a box cake mix instead of mixing everything from scratch. Remind your kids that if you are adding egg that they can’t dip a finger in because of the possibility of salmonella poisoning.
The kids can choose to use cupcake cups that are decorated for the holiday or spoon them directly into the muffin pan. Mini muffin pans create bite size cupcakes for the family to enjoy after dinner. If you have a window in the oven, kids will camp out and watch the cupcakes bake just like a television show.
photo credit: dyanna
Decorate those cupcakes with creamy icing. White icing can be turned into pink with a bit of red food coloring. Kids will be amazed by this as the white icing changes colors. For an extra special touch, add candy sprinkles or cinnamon red hot candies. It will be hard to keep the kids from eating up all the ingredients as they bake. It may be hard to keep you from sneaking that spoonful of icing when you should be adding it to the cupcakes too so be warned.
Sweets are fun to make and even more fun to eat. Cookies and cupcakes get a nice makeover on Valentine’s Day to help reflect the good feelings of the holiday as well as create great family togetherness.
Here are a couple great resources for cooking with the kids.
