Valentine’s Day is coming up quickly and that means a holiday party at many grade schools and preschools and daycare centers complete with cartoon character Valentines, shoeboxes converted into mailboxes for all the red and pink envelopes and perhaps someone’s mother making special shaped cookies out of Mickey Mouse cookie cutters.

There are many different ideas for Valentine’s Day cookies and cookies are something that children can help their mom or dad prepare without making too big of a mess. In addition, there are lessons that could be learned by the children while they are preparing the cookies, depending on their ages. Lessons like the stove and oven is always hot when someone is in the kitchen cooking so that means to stay away from it because it is dangerous; where milk and eggs come from and why people need certain foods such as proteins and carbohydrates.

Allowing the younger children to pour premeasured ingredients into a bowl and then have the older children use the hand mixer is a good way to split up the preparation details. Younger girls will enjoy using a My Little Pony cookie cutter and younger boys will like to use a brontosaurus cookie cutter. Cookie cutters are only sharp enough to cut through soft cookie dough and not cut little fingers.

Once the cookies are cut out with the different cookie cutter shapes and baked in the oven, children can use new paintbrushes and red and pink food coloring to ‘paint’ sugar cookies with different messages on them or use frosting to cover a cookie and then dip them in colored sugar. There is always the favorite of many children, the sprinkles which could be poured over the frosting for a festive look.

Many parents don’t have a lot of time to bake cookies from scratch and that is where a tube or tub of cookie dough comes into play. Several food manufacturers are taking into consideration the role of busy parents and have created rolls of cookie dough that simply need a rolling pin and it’s ready to have cookie cutters taken to it for uniquely shaped cookies. Other companies manufacture what looks like butter buckets of cookie dough that spoon out for easy use.