he made a batch for his class and thankfully we had a few left to enjoy for ourselves 🙂 the strawberry heart is a nice touch.
the recipe is based loosely on valentine’s cupcakes: vanilla cupcake recipe with buttercream frosting.
i asked him if his classmates enjoyed them and he said several asked him for the recipe so i guess it they were a hit!
odin made his class valentine’s day cards with time to spare – no last minute freak out and no help from us! also, he made yummy cupcakes.
odin has been experimenting with making pop-up paperworks. he’s totally fascinated with how to make three-dimensional creations so we got a few books and read some tutorials online and he decided to put his skills to work and came up with a simple but beautiful design for valentine’s day cards for his classmates.
he wanted a card that would pop-up a heart when opened and came up with the two layer design all by himself. and he certainly didn’t inherit my formidable power of procrastination because he came up with a plan to complete all the cards well ahead of valentine’s day!
here’s a closer-up look of the design of the heart. that’s some pretty precise x-acto knife work!
it is perhaps unsurprising to most that i have a rather complicated relationship with saint valentine’s day. there’s certainly nothing wrong with saint valentine himself, patron saint of affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers and young people. but i really could do without his conversion into the patron saint of consumerism fueling a 16 billion dollar(!) spending frenzy where the average holiday consumer spends $116! part of me really couldn’t agree more with a bright teenager’s apt description of the day, “happy arbitrary consumeristic representation of a romantic holiday day”.
i mean, the sanity train has left the rails when 53% of women in America would dump their boyfriends if they did not get them anything for valentine’s day and 15% of U.S. women send themselves flowers on valentine’s day.
but, then again – really – what’s so wrong with buying some flowers and chocolates as the smallest and humblest of reminders to the one you love that you still do?
( and, holy cow, theo’s pink salted vanilla caramels are TO DIE FOR! )