Cute and Easy Valentine's Day Snacks
One of my favorite ways to mark a special occasion is with food. A cute snack or treat, a favorite meal, special drinks, and sometimes all of the above.
This Valentine’s Day, I am focusing on cute and easy snacks & treats. Let’s start with the treats!!
Rice Krispies Treat Hearts
Such an easy treat to make and if you can find the seasonal red and white cereal mix, even cuter than usual.
I feel like most adults have made these at least once, but if you haven’t trust me it’s so easy. You can even make them in the microwave and the heart shape is totally optional. You could just decorate the top with sprinkles or Valentine’s Day m&m’s, a little chocolate drizzle, or get extra extra and do a combo. I only decorated four of our treats because I don’t like sprinkles. This is an easy treat to cut into shapes or bites and then decorate to your taste or make it a family activity and everyone can decorate, or not, their own.
The basic steps for Rice Krispies Treats are melt, stir, squish into a pan, cut, but you can find the actual recipe on most Rice Krispies cereal boxes and most Jet-Puffed marshmallow bags.
Valentine’s Day Muddy Buddies
Muddy buddies is another super easy treat to make. The addition of holiday m&m’s takes it from a regular treat to a cool treat. For Valentine’s Day add the red, pink, and white m&m’s, for Easter use the pastels, etc. You can also add other little things to fancy it up, like sprinkles, mini chocolate chips, mini peanut butter cups, little pretzels or anything else that makes your heart happy. In case you haven’t made this before, YOU NEED A GIANT BAG!!! A 2 gallon ziplock bag or an unused paper grocery bag, or a giant lidded container like I used here. Other than needing that one kind of weird thing, you literally just melt, mix, and shake. The recipe is on the box of Chex cereal.
Frosted Sugar Cookie Cake
I love frosted sugar cookies at Christmas, and in an attempt to make them part of every single special occasion and holiday, I have started making this sugar cookie cake. This is the most time consuming of the treats on the list because you have to let the cookie cake cool before frosting, but it is incredible. I don’t use the cream cheese frosting from the recipe, I just use the cookie cake part and then make a simple buttercream cookie frosting to go with it.
I added dreaded sprinkles to the edges because they are so cute, and I made a little chocolate sprinkle heart to put in the middle, but then I remembered we had raspberries and they would give a little tart flavor to this very sweet treat. You can leave the cookie cake naked, frost it with plain frosting, color your frosting, use sprinkles, candy hearts, raspberries or strawberries, sugar crystal sprinkles, pipe a design, the world is your oyster. Go wild, or don’t. It’ll be delicious either way.
In case you want to use the frosting I made, here is my not a recipe frosting recipe: about a stick of softened butter, 3ish cups of powdered sugar, a couple splashes of milk, a tsp of vanilla and like 1/4-1/2 a tsp of almond extract. Whip in a stand mixer or with a hand mixer. Start with like 2/3 of the stick of butter and 2.5 cups of powdered sugar, get that as incorporated as you can, add a splash of milk or half and half or heavy cream, vanilla, and almond extract, whip some more, then add more sugar or butter or milk and keep whipping until you get the texture and flavor you want. I also baked mine in an 11” tart pan instead of a cake pan this time, but both are great.
Heart Shaped Egg in a Hole and Bacon
To be fair, this is a meal and not a snack, but whatever, it’s still mostly easy.
To make the egg in a hole, or as we call it, eggy holes, use a heart shaped cookie cutter and cut out the middle of your bread. Melt butter in a skillet and pop your toast and egg in, season with salt and pepper and whatever else you like on eggs, and cook to your liking. Don’t forget to toast up your little beard hearts in the pan too.
The bacon hearts are a little more complicated so if you want to make them, start with them first. We made a bacon weave and baked it in the oven at 400 degrees until it was almost crispy, but not quite. Then Christopher used the heart cutter and cut out heart shapes and we popped them back in a little longer until they were crispy.
We also tried making V shapes to see if it would look like hearts, it didn’t, but it did give us a tasty bacon snack while we waited for the bacon weave to finish cooking.
This isn’t a hard breakfast, but it does take some time to put together the bacon hearts. So if you are looking for something a little less over the top, make bacon X’s and toast O’s to go with your heart eggy holes.
I fell hard for these pizza roses when I saw them online. Like HOW CUTE?! And who doesn’t love pizza? I misread the instructions and accidentally bought thick cut pepperoni, so I did make it harder for myself, but it was still pretty straight forward and so delicious. These would be perfect for any party, and maybe even for the Super Bowl this weekend.
I ended up adding a little extra sauce on the side, because I’m a saucy girl. I loved these. I didn’t use all of my pepperoni so I think I’ll get another sheet of crescent roll dough so I can make these cuties again.
I am a gin girl, so when I saw this three ingredient recipe I was SOLD! All you need is gin, fresh lemon juice, and jam. I used Hendrick’s Gin, Bonne Maman Four Fruits Preserves, and lemons for the cocktail, plus lemon peel and raspberries as garnish.
This gin and jam cocktail is tart and sweet and delightful. I even mixed a little drinky with the last of the jam in the jar, so I’m looking forward to that later.
Those are all the cute ideas I’ve got for this year. If you decide to make any of them, let us know how it goes in the comments.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
