Traditionally Valentine’s Day is celebrated with hearts and flowers, and phrases of love.  Young and old enjoy observing Valentine’s Day and one of the favorite ways to celebrate it is with special food treats.  For the children these can be cakes, cookies or candies.  For adults, a lobster dinner with champagne and roses would be a welcome treat.  Your choice of treats can be as simple as you wish or as complicated as you can make it.

Since, today, everyone seems to be very busy, let’s start with the simple ones.  The simplest of course would be to go to the market or bakery and purchase your heart-shaped goodies.

For those of us who bask in compliments aimed on our efforts, the direction would be of course to make your own.  Making your own can be as simple as purchasing ready-made cookie dough and fashioning it into heart-shaped Valentine Cookies.  If you wish to take a little more effort, you can try one of the Sugar Cookie recipes listed in our recipe section.

The dough can be dyed with food colors or you can make frosting to decorate the cookies with.  Rolling out and decorating cookies is a great family project and all the children can be enlisted to help.  They will love it!    can be purchased at your local culinary store or on-line.

For ease in rolling out Sugar Cookie Dough, you should either have a [amazon ASIN=”B002L8A1SK”]silicone covered rolling pin[/amazon] or purchase ‘stockinet’s’ to cover your rolling pin.  With the use of the stockinet, you rub the flour into the stockinet instead of the dough.  This prevents the cookies from becoming too tough;  your cookies will be tender and delectable as they should be.  To avoid too much sugar as present in frosting, just brush the unbaked cookies with Egg White and sprinkle on [amazon ASIN=”B0026PF0NY”]Colored Sanding Sugar[/amazon].

If you have a [amazon ASIN=”B00004S1AS”]cookie press[/amazon], molded or Spritz Cookies can also be made, but these do take a little more effort and a certain expertise in the handling of the cookie press.  Once you master its use though, the possibilities are endless.

Go ahead and have a Valentine’s Day Cookie Party.  It doesn’t matter whether you use store bought dough, store bought cookies to decorate or if you go all the way and make your own dough.  The fun and memories will be the same for the children participating in this event.  Just enjoy the moment!