Welcome to kidscookdinner.com, a website my brother Max and I started five years ago to share our thoughts about food and cooking and helping hungry people.  It’s also a digital cookbook for our family to make sure we remember the meals we love (as well as the ones that didn’t work out so well…)

To learn more about the website, scroll down a few posts to About KidsCookDinner.  But to see what we are cooking today, stay right here.

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, I decided to make Valentine’s Day cookies as my valentine to my family.  I used a traditional sugar cookie recipe (this one is based on Nigella Lawson’s recipe from her cookbook, Feast) and then go crazy with the frosting.

Ingredients are as follows:

• 12 ounces softened butter (unsalted if possible, if not, reduce salt by 1/2 teaspoon)
• 1  cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 3 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt

The first step is to make sure the butter is soft so it’s easy to cream.  If you want to take a shortcut you can microwave it, but for no more than 15 seconds.  It needs to be soft, not melted.

Then you cream the sugar into the butter and beat it till it is well blended and pale yellow.

Beat the egg and the vanilla, and add to the butter mix.

Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt and stir with a whisk

Add the dry ingredients to the butter-egg mixture and stir well. The dough will be pretty stiff and crumbly.

Form into two balls and flatten into discs.  Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for an hour (the dough needs to rest.)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and then roll out the first ball of dough and cut your cookies out and place on greased tray (or one with a silpat).  I mainly cut out hearts but I threw in a few frogs in the valentine spirit of frogs being kissed and turning into princes.  Put the cut-out cookies in the fridge while you roll out the second disk of dough and cut shapes from that disk.

Bake until just light gold around the edges and let cool completely. Watch carefully so you don’t burn them!

(Now the fun part).  After the cookies are cooled, get your frosting and decorations ready.  I used 2 cans of store-bought white vanilla frosting, mixing red gel color into one.  We also had assorted sprinkles and M&Ms to decorate.

Max even helped frost, but I think that was mainly so he could eat the ones he over-frosted.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!