Heart-Shaped Foods for Valentine's Day

Yesterday the kids and I had fun making and eating all kinds of heart shaped foods for Valentines day.

For breakfast we started with hot dog shaped hearts filled with scrambled eggs. The hotdogs were split down the middle (length-wise), starting on one end and stopping a few inches from the other end, then the split hotdog was opened up to form a heart and secured with a toothpick. Next, we placed the hotdog hearts on a heated buttery pan and we poured in the scrambled eggs mixture.

This part was a little tricky because the egg mixture kept spreading out of the hotdog, so I ended up pouring the mixture little bit at a time, letting it set in the pan, then gradually adding more. There were still spills outside of the hotdog, but I just let those set and slowly put them back into the hotdogs. It is important to keep the heat on low when making these, to avoid burning the bottom side because it takes a while for the eggs to set. Once the eggs were almost completely set, we slowly flipped it over to cook the other side.
We happened to have some leftover scramble eggs mixture, so I ended up cutting out heart shapes out of the middle of toast breads and cooking the left over eggs in those as well.

I didn't happen to have any heart shaped cookie cutters, so I ended up cutting the hearts out with a knife, which took a long time and not nearly as good looking as if you used a heart cookie cutter, so if you are planning on making these or other heart shaped foods, I highly recommend using a cookie cutter.

In preparation for Valentine's day I bought some melting chocolate last week, but I realized that I completely forgot to get some strawberries or pretzel rods to dip into the chocolate, so I had to get a little creative to find something else to dip into the chocolate. I wanted to make something heart-shaped, so I thought of making Madeleine, which are traditional French cakes that look kind of like little shells. I got a Madeleine pan a while back, and it is definitely one of our favorite treats to bake. I cut the Madeleines in half on an angle and put two of the round ends together, securing with toothpicks, to make them look like heart. The left over ends of the cakes that I didn't use to make the hearts were gone in no time, gobbled down by my hungry little helpers.
Next I melted some chocolate and put in some pumpkin powder (like what I did in my chocolate pretzel recipe I shared a while back) and coated the top of the hearts with the chocolate mixture.

My boys loved these, and they didn't even know there was pumpkin in it :)

I also rolled up some bacon, secured them with toothpicks, and baked them in the oven at 400F for about 20 min. I let them cool, then placed the bacon "roses" in a small bowl with some shredded lettuce around it, to make a mini bacon rose bouquet.

Some of the other heart-shaped foods I put together were mandarin oranges and grape tomatoes. I cut two mandarin segments on an angle and put the two together with a toothpick. The same concept was used for the grape tomatoes.

For dinner, we had salmon burgers. I had the great idea of cooking the salmon patties in heart shapes, but that didn't end up happening because I didn't end up having enough time to get all those patties shaped by hand. But if you have one of those heart shaped cookie cutters, you could use the bigger sized ones and it would have made it a lot easier to shape the heart patties.

Here's what the entire meal looked like: