Real-Food Valentine’s Day Snack Ideas

Need real-food Valentine’s Day snack ideas? Here are 10 easy ones your kids will love.

Here at MOMables, we like to keep things simple and healthy. But once in a while, it’s okay to spend the extra time to make it fun! All you need are a few inexpensive and easy-to-find tools, and you can easily make a meal or snack fancy for Valentine’s Day! Need more lunch ideas and just a bit (or maybe a lot) of help getting school lunches planned? MOMables has you covered, come check it out!

Tools You’ll Need:

• Small heart-shaped cookie cutter(s)
• Toothpicks, food picks, or uncooked spaghetti noodles
• Heart-shaped ice cube mold

You can use a small cookie cutter to make heart-shaped mini sandwiches (made with whole-grain gluten-free bread and MOMables Sunflower Nutella), and sliced cheese, chewy granola bars, cucumber and bell pepper bites, and blood orange slices, and to help shape and remove the stems from strawberry halves. A small cookie cutter is a fun way to cut the core from apples sliced horizontally. Check out these tips on how to keep apples from browning.

You can cut baby carrots at an angle, then flip them and secure them with uncooked spaghetti noodles (after starting the hole with a toothpick). Or just use a toothpick or thin food pick, if the eater can be trusted with them!

A healthier alternative to frozen juice is using a heart-shaped ice mold to make your own Fruit Ice Cubes! Fun, healthy, and delicious!

What About the Scraps?

Other than just eating them on the spot, feeding them to a toddler or family dog, or tucking them under the shapes when you serve them, there are plenty of uses for scraps made from cookie-cutter cuteness.

Veggie scraps work great in a salad, sandwich wrap, or tossed in a soup or stir-fry. Fruit scraps can also work on a salad, or you can save them for a smoothie!

For sandwiches, I like to cut the bread first before adding the sandwich fillings so I can save the scraps for meatloaf, homemade bread crumbs or croutons, (1 cup torn scraps equals 1 slice of bread), or MOMables Frugal French Toast Sticks.

And meat and cheese scraps are still yummy in a quesadilla, grilled cheese pocket sandwiches, sandwich wraps, or on top of pizza!

Some Other Heart-y Ideas!

For the cookie cutters, any firm fruit will do. Apples, melons, and mangoes work well. And any vegetable wide enough for the cutter. You can slice larger carrots into vertical slabs to get large enough areas for a small cutter. You can even turn the heart-cored apples into MOMables apple sandwiches for a fun twist.

Any small oblong fruit or vegetable works well to turn into hearts, too. Grapes and small oval tomatoes can be sliced horizontally and secured with a toothpick or noodle to make hearts as well!

Bread for toast (broil on a pan in the oven for a few minutes on each side), pancakes, and waffles all work well with a cookie cutter. Heart-shaped crackers make a great snack (Gluten-Free Lunchbox Crackers and Homemade Cheese Crackers work well). Or make your own fun Cracker Stackers with heart-shaped deli meats and sliced cheeses!

Other healthy uses for the ice mold include Frozen Yogurt Bites, Frozen Cloud Bites, and frozen smoothie bites (check out these Chocolate Green Smoothie and Easy Strawberry Smoothie recipes from MOMables!)

The best part about holidays such as Valentine’s Day is that they give our family the opportunity to get in the kitchen together and have fun. There is nothing quite as cute as seeing my little ones get creative with their food. Their smiles are all I need!