For a romantic Valentine's Day dinner, three courses are enough: a light appetizer, a main course and a delicious dessert.
All washed down with a good glass of wine and seasoned with sweetness, complicity and many small attentions.
A riot of little hearts will help to make even the simplest dish on the subject, for example a heart-shaped pizza is already a nice idea, it won't be original but it will be difficult to appreciate.
The ideal, for the Valentine's Day dinner, is to offer quick recipes or to prepare them in advance, to enjoy the evening, without thinking too much about the kitchen.
Pumpkin hearts with cream cheese and prawns
A light and fast appetizer, to accompany with a nice glass of prosecco.
Ingredients for 2 people
> 6 pumpkin hearts (or pieces of bread);
> spreadable cheese;
> 6 prawns;
> extra virgin olive oil;
> salt.
Preparation
To cut the pumpkin into a heart shape, make first slices of uniform height and then the hearts with a rather sharp mold. The pumpkin is cooked in the oven on a lightly oiled baking pan. It must cook well, but remain crisp. It is the slightly more difficult part of this recipe because it is not easy to make hearts all the same and made well with pumpkin.
If you prefer an easier but equally effective idea, you can replace the pumpkin with some crumbled bread and get your hearts much more easily, which will be lightly toasted in the pan before being stuffed.
Stuff the pumpkin (or the loaf) with spreadable cheese. Fry the prawns and place one on each little heart. The prawns must of course be hot and therefore fried at the last minute.
Salmon lasagne
The main course is best prepared a few hours in advance, so you don't have to spend too much time at dinner. A lasagna is therefore a good solution . Have you ever prepared it with salmon?
Ingredients for 2 people
> 1/2 liter of béchamel;
> 150 g fresh egg lasagne, very thin pastry;
> 200 g smoked salmon;
> 30 g Parmigiano reggiano;
> 100 g fresh spinach;
> pepper.
Preparation
Prepare the béchamel. Lightly brown the spinach in salted water and drain very well. Pour a ladle of béchamel on the bottom of the pan . Lay two sheets of lasagna, fill with a third of the spinach and one of the salmon and cover with béchamel. Continue to finish the ingredients. Finish with the last two sheets of lasagna and cover them completely with the béchamel.
Add the Parmesan and a sprinkling of pepper . Bake at 180 degrees for 18/20 minutes.
Romantic Valentine's Day Cupcakes
The Valentine's Day dinner can only end with a chocolate dessert full of hearts . These cupcakes are very simple, and you can prepare them a little in advance, so you just have to stuff and decorate them on Valentine's Day.
With the quantity described you get about 15 cupcakes, so a little too much to eat in two. Keep them for breakfast the next day ...
Ingredients for the base
> 150 g dark chocolate;
> 150 g flour;
> 150 g sugar;
> 150 g butter;
> 5 eggs;
> 1 sachet of baking powder.
For the filling
> 240 g fresh cream or unsweetened vegetable;
> 280 g mascarpone;
> 100 g condensed milk.
Preparation
Melt chocolate and butter together. Whip the egg yolks with the sugar. Stir in the melted chocolate with the butter, stirring constantly, adding the flour, baking powder and finally the egg whites until stiff. Pour the mixture into the cupcake molds and bake in a static oven at 175 ° for 25-28 minutes.
For the filling, whip the cream. Mix the mascarpone with the condensed milk and add it to the cream. Decorate the cupcakes with the help of a pastry bag. Finish the decoration with many romantic little hearts.
Variation : add a couple of tablespoons of cocoa to the mascarpone mixture and condensed milk before adding it to the cream.
