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What do you get your (cheese) lover for Valentine's Day?

Heart-shaped cheese, of course.

Homemade Cheese Hearts

You can make your own heart-shaped cheese with a heart-shaped cookie cutter. Here are a three hints if you are going to try it at home:

Need heart-shaped cookie cutters? You can find You can find lots of heart-shaped cookie cutters here.

Hint 1: Use firm, or semi-firm cheese - nothing too hard, too soft, or too crumbly. We used Tillamook Colby Jack and a store brand medium Cheddar. The Colby Jack was slightly softer, and easier to work with. Also, the Colby Jack is a more interesting looking cheese. Fiscalini's Purple Moon would also have made for an interesting looking heart, but we didn't have any on hand.

Hint 2: Tillamook's 2-pound Baby Loafs are the perfect size for smaller cookie cutters, but too small for larger ones. We liked using the Baby Loaf because it made it easy to cut 1/4 inch slices that fit our cookie cutters.

Hint 3: Cookie cutters come in metal or plastic. The metal ones are easier to use with the cheese, and produce better results. Cookie cutters are made for cookie dough, not cheese, and the plastic ones don't hold their shape too well when pressing down on the cheese. You can see in the photo below that the cheese on the left, using the plastic cookie cutter, made a deformed heart. The one on the right, using a metal cookie cutter, kept the intended shape better.