Spiderman heart cookies for Valentines

When you have kids, Valentines feels a little like Christmas. Or is it just me?

This year Tristan is in the bigger kid room at daycare and there are twice as many kids in there compared to the toddler room last year. There are also more staff members. Just like last year, I decided to bake sugar cookies again. Who doesn't like a sugar cookie, right?

I had a few fun heart designs sketched out but when I went to fill out the names on the Valentines cards, I had a great idea! Tristan is into Spiderman these days so everyone in his class will be getting Spiderman Valentine cards. I kept looking at Spiderman on the cards thinking how he was so red and that he could very well be on a cookie for Valentines. I remembered coming across a strawberry design which used heart cookie cutters on Pinterest and thought it was a cool idea. I could do the same thing with Spiderman! And wouldn't it be totally cool to match the Valentine cookie with the Valentine card?? Oh yeah :) Then I googled and found out that everyone has already done it. Duh.

Ingredient list was included in each of the cookies

I'm happy with the results, even though it took me awhile to get at it. I ran into problems when I ran out of ingredients and I didn't have enough icing. I cheated by diluting the icing and flooding my cookies only to get really bad grainy results when it dried. Don't even think about diluting your icing man!!! It was disastrous and it turned pink instead of red. Then I bought more ingredients and made more icing and mixed more red and finally got it right. I had to mix red three times so all the cookies actually have three different shades of red. Oh well. If you look close, there are imperfections everywhere! I don't think the 3-5 year olds at daycare will judge me too much though, right? Lesson learned.

 

The kids are all getting the chocolate sugar cookies with the Spiderman heart design but the staff will each get a red velvet cupcake. I had to do a batch for Jean-Louis to take to work tomorrow for his potluck anyway so it worked out well. This is the second time I have made these cupcakes. I added more cocoa to them this time and got a deeper red as a result as well. I love cocoa! I substituted about half of the white sugar for yellow cane sugar. I also used my favorite whipped cream cheese frosting instead of the one in the recipe and it worked much better for piping since it uses granulated sugar instead of icing sugar. Icing sugar tends to turn liquid when in contact with cream cheese and a runny icing isn't very pretty. By the way, if anyone is wondering, cupcakes are so much easier to make than sugar cookies! Decorating cookies is what kills you, especially if you run into problems.

Happy Valentines Day!

See those sprinkles? Homemade using dried up royal icing:)