Make Valentine’s Day festive for your children with these four super easy ideas to create heart shaped food for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert.
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Kids love holidays, but making holidays special can be daunting for parents. This year, we kept our celebration simple for Valentine’s Day. We exchanged cards and candy. We read all of the Valentine books we could find on our shelves. But the real highlight of our day was having heart shaped food for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert. Our three year old was absolutely delighted with festive hearts on his plate at every meal. The ideas were really super simple and easy. Any parent could implement them to make Valentine’s Day a special day for their kids.
Heart Shaped Food for Breakfast
Use a cookie cutter to turn ordinary freezer waffles into a delightfully festive breakfast. We especially like the Wilton Comfort Grip Heart Cutter because of its extra large size and stainless steel blade. It’s also dishwasher safe which is a plus.
We topped our heart shaped waffles with whipped cream and red sprinkles to emphasize the heart shape. If you think this is a great idea, at Christmas time you can also make Christmas tree waffles by cutting the freezer waffles into tree shapes and adorning them with candy, raisins or other small goodies for a special breakfast.
Heart Shaped Food for Lunch
It’s really easy to turn sandwiches into heart shapes. Our three year old son’s favorite food is peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We shared a few weeks ago how we love to use cookie cutters to make lunch fun. So of course, we had to use our heart shaped cookie cutter to make heart shaped sandwiches for lunch. The stainless steel blade on the Wilton Comfort Grip Cutter works especially great to cut through thick bread. We served our sandwiches with grapes and veggie straws.
Heart Shaped Food for Dinner
Pizza is one of the easiest dinners to make in any shape, especially heart shaped. You can make your own crust and shape it into a heart. However, I was so excited when I saw an idea on Google+ this week to use pitas as pizza crust. In her post on Valentine Heart Pita Pizzas, Jill Mills at Kitchen Fun with My Three Sons uses kitchen scissors to cut whole wheat pitas and pepperonis into heart shapes. How easy is that? Our son was thrilled! I would encourage you to visit her website for more fun food ideas for kids.
Heart Shaped Food for Dessert
If you search on Pinterest, you’ll find tons of recipes for decadent desserts that incorporate heart shapes. With a toddler and an infant, it wasn’t practical for me to get that creative this year. I still wanted to do something to make dessert special, though. I just made a boxed brownie mix in a heart shaped pan and topped it with white frosting and Valentine M&Ms. It’s not fancy or complicated, but my boys loved it and that’s all that really matters.
with a dark chocolate brownie mix intended for a 9 x 13 pan. The larger mix in a smaller pan made the brownies thick and gooey. Heart shaped brownies are a delicious Valentine’s Day treat to satisfy chocolate cravings without a lot of fuss.
What other ideas do you have to make heart shaped food? Please comment below and share. We need some new ideas for next year!
Angie In My 30s says
March 6, 2014 at 10:12 amAWE those pizzas are just TOO CUTE!
Carrie says
March 6, 2014 at 12:24 pmThanks Angie! I got that idea from Jill Mills at Kitchen Fun with My Three Sons. Have you been to her site? She has so many cute ideas to make food fun for kids.