PEMBERVILLE – If you want to do something sweet for your sweetheart for Valentine’s Day, these honey and lemon-infused cookies are the way to go.

Pat Titkemeier has been making her Honey Cookie Cutouts for 61 years, and February calls for heart shapes slathered with pink and white frosting.

She said the recipe was from a Betty Crocker cookbook that she believes her mom found in the 1950s or 1960s.

“When we were growing up … we made it every Christmas,” Titkemeier said about this cookie recipe.

She has continued making it for the past six decades.

She started looking through her mom’s Betty Crocker books after she passed, and there it was under the name Merry Christmas Cookies.

“This is Betty Crocker’s recipe, and the directions are more mine than the books,” she said. “The recipes are identical.”

The frosting has changed, however. Her mom made the frosting with milk and powdered sugar. Titkemeier added soft butter and lemon extract.

The cookie recipe also calls for lemon extract and she said to use good quality. Her husband, Larry, once purchased an off brand and the cookies just didn’t taste the same, she said.

Titkemeier has extended the cooking-making outside Christmas to include Valentine’s Day but no other time, so they stay special.

At Christmas, she uses stars, angels, gingerbread boys, and tree cutouts with red, white and green frosting.

The cookies can be frozen.

Titkemeier prefers baking to cooking.

“I prefer the baking: Pies, cakes, cookies,” she said. “This is what I like. This is where I’m comfortable.”

She does most of her baking from scratch.

“The first thing we could bake were the cookies,” Titkemeier said about her and her siblings. “That was the easiest thing for us to do when we were little.”

She has two brothers and one sister, and said her sister always makes these cookies for Christmas as well. One brother makes their mom’s peanut butter cookies.

Titkemeier’s mom, Alice, taught her how to bake. She specialized in good-old farm cooking including pies and cookies as well as the best roast beef ever, Titkemeier said. Alice would also bake her children three-tiered cakes for their birthdays.

Titkemeier’s pick was always yellow cake with vanilla frosting.

She has copied a lot of her mom’s recipes and shared them with family. Some of the most popular include broccoli cheese casserole, cherry delight and ginger cookie cutouts.

Titkemeier is a member of the Quilting Eagles and Friends of the Pemberville Library, where she leads a monthly book club.

Her home is full of Currier & Ives serving ware. She is secretary of the national Currier & Ives Dinnerware Collectors. The group typically holds conventions once a year with the opportunity to purchase and swap pieces. All the pieces used to be made in Sebring, until it burned down in 1986. Since then, the rare pieces have become treasured.

A Lahman by birth, Titkemeier is a 1968 Eastwood High School graduate. She attended Muskingum College in New Concord and earned a degree in English. She retired from Eastwood as a high school English teacher in 2013 after teaching full time for 12 years. She previously had taught at Otsego Junior High School.

She said she misses her teaching family and her students.

“I felt I had to retire when I woke up at 3 in the morning with a red mark going down someone’s paper,” she said.