Heart Shaped Tea Biscuits for Valentine’s Day

My daycare children love to eat heart shaped food on Valentine’s Day.  This year we made heart shaped tea biscuits.  The children love a good sensory activity and kneading dough feels fantastic. Plus, I love a hands-on learning activity that makes math fun. When the biscuits were done we sliced them in half and added cream cheese and strawberry jam for a white and red treat!

Here is the recipe we used from Tase of Home.  The kids over kneaded the dough because they had such fun playing with it and the tea biscuits still turned out great.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour (we used whole wheat)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil

Directions:

• In a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and salt. Combine milk and oil; pour over dry ingredients and stir just until moistened.
• Turn onto a floured surface; knead 5-6 times (or 102 times). Roll out to 1/2-in. thickness; cut with a floured 2-in. biscuit cutter. Place on a greased baking sheet. Bake at 425° for 13-15 minutes or until golden brown. Yield: 6 biscuits.

Kneading dough has a soothing effect on children and it is great for developing finger muscles for future printing practice.

We have child size rolling pins but they prefer mine.  Children love to do ‘real work’ with ‘real tools’.  Baking is a great way to involve them in hands on learning.

First we estimated how many hearts we could fit in the dough and then we counted them as we used the heart shaped cookie cutter.

Ready for the oven and another chance for more counting practice.

I flipped them over half way through baking to achieve a browned effect on both sides.

Cream cheese and strawberry jam helped us complete the colour theme of our Valentine’s Day snack.  I gave the kids a little math question as we spread on the jam.  2 cream cheese hearts plus 2 jam hearts equals how many hearts all together?

We had a little bit of dough left over after we baked the last heart so the kids had a chance to make a letter with the dough and eat their own letter biscuit.

M is for Mmmmmmmmmm, delicious!