Sharing Valentines

My daughter and I visited the schoolchildren at our church's Christian school this past Thursday and gave them some Valentine treats.

 I found the idea for this on Pinterest (of course).  They are super easy to make.  Just combine red velvet cake mix, 2 eggs, and 1/2 cup of softened butter.  Roll into balls (messy!), and put on a baking sheet.  Bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes.  Spread cream cheese frosting in the middle of two cookies and roll in sprinkles.  The original recipe did not say to grease the baking sheet, so I didn't.  However, I do think it would be better to since the cookies stuck and left part of the middle on the sheet.

These cookies are really good!  My husband liked it, my daughter liked it, and I liked it.  I haven't heard from the schoolchildren, but I'm sure they liked them as well.

I also made butterfly Valentines for them (see the Pinterest picture below).  Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of them.  I wanted to get a picture of Gracie handing them out, but I couldn't get a good angle on her and she was being somewhat uncooperative having one of her rare shy moments.  The original pin calls for suckers and googly eyes.  I went to Walmart the day after Valentine's Day and couldn't find ANY suckers in the Valentine area.  I was too lazy to go over to the candy aisle in the grocery department.  However, I did see some cute pencils and decided to use them instead.  I printed off 11 sheets for 22 butterflies and thought that I would get them cut out in about 20 minutes.  Boy, was I wrong!  It took about 45 minutes to cut those things out!  Granted some of that (about 5 minutes) was spent in getting Gracie up and settling her with some milk.  She wanted me to sit with her, so I took my cutting over to where she was and she climbed over me part of the time, but still, I was surprised it took so long!  I tried cutting the slits to push the pencil through, but decided to simply tape the butterfly to each pencil instead.  It was much quicker.

Source: keepinglifecreative.com via Ava on Pinterest

Source: Uploaded by user via Ava on Pinterest