A Little Bit About a Lot of Things

Valentine’s Day may be over, but I love hearts all year round. Between working on our school Valentine cards, our crafts at home and our grazing boards for friends, we have been celebrating all month long.

When I have the time, I like to make things from scratch, but usually, because the littles are running all around the house, I take a few short cuts. For example – those cupcakes above? Made the cake from a box mix. Made the frosting from scratch because, I mean, let’s be honest, nothing is more important than the frosting!

These cookies I make from a sugar cookie recipe I got from a friend. I love them because they aren’t sweet, as some sugar cookies can be. The frosting is just confectioner’s sugar, milk and vanilla so it is SUPER sweet – but paired with the cookie (that isn’t sweet), it just works out to the right amount of sweetness.

I always stock up on sprinkles. Those cute ones on the cupcakes – the multi colored hearts – were a cute find at Michael’s. I love all things pink and red, but these were a refreshing change of pace. At Michael’s they have smaller $1 packets of sprinkles and you can always find some cute things at Home Goods.

I put together this cute grazing board for a play date: vanilla cupcakes, sugar cookies, M&M’s in Valentine colors, cinnamon hearts, gummy hearts and Starburst jelly bean hearts. Let’s not forget The Happy Chocolatier in the mix with their cubze – the fun messages inside just make me smile.

For play dates, I sometimes like to have one structured activity and then have some free time to play. My go to is decorating cookies. The kids could really care less what the cookies taste like, so if I’m in a rush, I just pick up a roll of cookies from the market and cut them out in fun shapes. I buy the frosting from a jar and divide them up into little cups to keep things from getting too messy. My secret trick is doing everything on either baking sheets or disposable aluminum plans (which work well because the kids can just take these home afterwards). I give each child a set of their own sprinkles – I put them in egg containers that I cut in half. It has been a hit at every play date!

One of my other favorite activities that we did this month was decorate mailboxes. My kids like to play “post office” all year round. I picked up these cute mailboxes at Target for $1. (Full disclosure, I made this one as a sample) The kids decorated them with stickers and fun washi tape. They had a great time writing each other letters and “delivering them” to friends.

Put together this cute little plate last minute. A strawberry shortcake from Whole Foods, Linzer cookies from the Whole Foods bulk cookie bin, those cute vanilla and chocolate hearts are from Whole Foods too (sensing a pattern here?) Chocolate cubze from The Happy Chocolatier, and assorted heart candy from Priscilla Candy Shop in Concord (which by the way had some really good prices on candy).

I have a few rules in my house, one of them being, we NEVER do glitter. Let’s save that for school and let the teachers clean that up 🙂 But I kind of allowed it for this project. My kids had a BLAST making them. We started off with some self seal laminating sheets. We peeled back half of the sheet and put on our glitter directly to the sticky side – you can use glitter, or in this case, we tried out confetti. When we were done, we peeled off the second half of the paper and folded it over the confetti, making a 5×7 sheet. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be perfect – ours had wrinkles in them! For the hearts, take two pieces of construction paper and fold in half. Cut out large hear and a smaller on inside. We taped the laminated confetti sheet to one side of the heart and then glued the other heart on top of it We left some of the hearts plain, but you could certainly embellish the construction paper with markers, stickers or washi tape. Punch a hole and add some string/ribbon and you have a fun Valentine you can hang in the window! Another idea, if you really can’t stand the idea of using glitter or confetti is tissue paper – find some cute heart paper or some pink striped paper and cut into thin strips! You can make this any time of year just by changing the heart into a circle or any other fun shape.

What are your favorite things to do for Valentine’s Day with your kids?

Tags: candy, cookies, crafts, grazing board, holiday, kids, short cuts, valentines day