"heart-shaped" news and stories

As Valentine's Day approaches, there certainly won't be any shortage heart-shaped things, whether it's a gift to give your sweetheart, or something for you to use in the kitchen.

The Big Love Ice Cream Spoon by Alessi comes from Italy and is made of shiny stainless steel. It's perfect to start your Valentine's Day with breakfast in bed (a bowl of Special K can be very romantic, you know), and to end your evening with a bowl of ice cream. The spoons come in a set of four, but let's hope that you only use one...to share!

The spoons are $39.90, available from Amazon.com.

Heart-shaped cake pans are great for Valentine's Day. After all, anything shaped as a heart - cakes, cookies, mashed potatoes - is automatically perceived as romantic being romantic. The problem with heart-shaped bakeware is that it isn't terribly practical. You have to store it and probably will not be using it nearly as much as more traditional square and round pans. But Reynold's has come out with a line of shaped aluminum mini cake pans. Usethe Fun Shapes pans to bake heart-shaped mini cakes and then simply throw out the tin as you would with an ordinary cupcake wrapper. The company recently started marketing these, but plans to put them out for most holidays. I paid $1.49 for this pack of 24 at my local grocery store.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

 

Have you seen Target's new dollar store competition: the dollar section? I sure have, and I know as well as anyone that it's impossible to pass up the siren song of cute kitchenware for $1. Especially when it's heart-shaped.

Sarah Gim raved over heart-shaped measuring spoons just now, so I knew it was time to contribute my find: these pink-and-white heart-shaped ice cube trays I saw at a recent visit to Target. This wasn't the only $1 kitchenware I saw... I'll introduce you to the cutest red heart measuring cups in a later post (my three-year-old is cooking with them in style).