I *heart* U

Four days ago, Daniel and I celebrated our 5th Valentine's Day as a couple. Each Valentine's Day, we've exchanged cards and Daniel has given me beautiful flower arrangements- always with red roses- and something chocolatey. This year he gave me the best 'assortment' box ever! Dove chocolates: peanut butter meltaways, dark chocolate filled with milk chocolate and chocolate caramels..... Yummmy!! Over the years, I've given him different gifts to celebrate the day and this year I took the phrase "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach" to a whole new level.
For breakfast, I made him delicious, from-scratch, heart-shaped cinnamon rolls. This was a true labor of love because even though I made the dough, sliced it, and placed it in the pans, I still had to wake up to pop them in the oven and make the cream cheese icing. This meant waking up when Dan's 5:30am alarm went off and not immediately falling back asleep! The recipe I used is from this blog. To get them in the shape of a heart, you simply roll the dough from both sides and meet them in the middle.

For lunch, I made some heart shaped breadsticks and calzones. I used Pillsbury breadsticks and pizza crust, both found in the refrigerated section of the commissary. I added some melted butter, garlic salt and Italian seasoning to the breadsticks for extra flavor.

My heart-ish shaped calzone.

I also made some extra special sweet treats for desserts. The first creation was a large batch of peanut butter chocolate hearts (think Reese's cups!). I used this recipe and instead of rolling the peanut butter mixture into egg shapes, I used a heart shaped cookie cutter.
Dipping them into the chocolate was by far the hardest, most challenging part of the process. Though the peanut butter hearts had been refrigerated overnight, the chocolate thinned with Crisco, and I was using my fancy double boiler from Pampered Chef, it was not easy to make them look pretty and have them evenly covered with chocolate. The original blog post says she used a skewer to dip them, but I found a carving fork (like the one from this set) sprayed with a little Pam worked the best. It allowed for the hearts to remain secure and not fall to pieces and the Pam helped to slide them off onto the wax paper for cooling.
The last thing I made was a batch of super-moist chocolate cupcakes. I got my inspiration from this blog:

Source: glorioustreats.blogspot.com via Kelly on Pinterest

Though I didn't use the recipes for the cupcakes or the icing, I did do the heart-shaped decorating technique. This was definitely the easiest thing I baked all day! I used a double fudge chocolate cake mix from a box and canned thick and creamy vanilla icing (Betty Crocker). I used a couple drops of food coloring to turn the icing pink and when the cupcakes were cooled, I sliced the 'dome' off of them and cut out the hearts with a small cookie cutter. Then I simply iced the flat part of the cupcake and replaced the dome. I didn't use powdered sugar, but I was pleasantly surprised that my cupcakes looked a lot like the ones in the picture!

Daniel enjoyed everything- and said he probably gained about 10 pounds! It was an extra sweet Valentine's Day for us- our last one as a family of 3. Anna also got to taste everything I made, though I think her favorite was the lollipop that came with her flower & teddy bear from her Daddy.

Our little love bug enjoying her sucker.