DIY Valentine: A Sweet Treat that You Don’t Eat!
My girls and I love to celebrate Valentine’s Day–I consider it a holiday centered around honoring our loved ones. I love making and sending special cards to special people, helping my girls make small gifts for their small friends, and planning something thoughtful for my own life partner. What I don’t love, however, is the mass media’s take on Valentine’s Day–all expensive greeting cards and cheap chocolates, in my opinion.
Every winter, my girls and I make cinnamon cut-outs as gifts and decorations for both Christmas and Valentine’s Day–the heavy, decadent, sweet scent seems appropriate for winter holidays, and combined with a dough that you roll out and cut with cookie cutters, it’s a suitable replacement for the tactile pleasure and fun of family togetherness that we might otherwise get from baking two holidays’ worth of sugar cookies.
No, you don’t get to eat these cookies, but you do get to have them, and they’ll smell delicious forever. Here’s our recipe and tutorial:
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You will need:
- one cup cinnamon (yes, I’m serious–one cup!)
- 3/4 cup applesauce (remember, you’re not eating this, so it doesn’t have to be gourmet)
- any variety and amount of sweet-smelling spices you desire (popular choices in our house are nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves)
- rolling pin
- cookie cutters
- baking sheet, ungreased
- glass straw or tube from a dismantled ball point pen
1. Combine your applesauce and spices in a nice, big bowl. You can stir by hand at first, but as the mixture combines, you’ll eventually need to knead it in your hands like modeling dough.
2. Test your dough’s consistency as you’re kneading it. If it’s sticky, add more cinnamon or other spices. If it’s crumbly, add more applesauce.
3. Dust your work surface with more spice, and roll out your dough to about 1/4″, although thickness isn’t really that important. If your kiddos roll out their dough super-thick, it’ll just take their cut-outs longer to dry, is all.
4. Using cookie cutters or a butter knife or just your hands and imagination, make shapes just as if you were cutting out sugar cookies. You can also get away with sculpting some very small figures with your dough.
5. If you’d like to hang your cut-outs as ornaments, poke a hole through them using a glass straw or the tube from a dismantled ball point pen.
6. Set your oven to its lowest setting and put your cinnamon cut-outs in for two hours, then turn off the oven, but don’t open the door or remove the cut-outs, and leave them inside overnight.
7. The next morning, turn your cut-outs over–if the backsides still seem a little damp, flip them all over and bake them for another half-hour or so. If the cut-outs are dry through-and-through, however, then you’re done!
Do you bake anything special for Valentine’s Day?
I have these in the oven right now, and they smell delicious! Of course, most of our cookie cutter collection is Christmas stuff, so we’ve got lots of cinnamon snowmen and candycanes now, but my kids had a blast making them, which is the important thing.