Just because Christmas is over doesn’t mean that you should put the gingerbread decorations away.
There are a lot of holidays that would make a good excuse to decorate a gingerbread or cookie house, and Valentine’s Day is one of the best.
Valentine’s Day gingerbread houses can be decorated with piped designs, or with the holiday-specific candy that’s sold for the holiday. Because Valentine’s Day has a lot of candy-giving associated with it, decorating a house with red, pink, and white candy makes sense as a decoration and maybe as a gift for a loved one.
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Making the house.
To make a gingerbread house to decorate for Valentine’s Day, you can use any gingerbread recipe that you like, or a sugar cookie recipe if you prefer. Unless you want to save the house for a long time, you don’t need to use construction-grade gingerbread unless the house is going to be large or structurally complicated.
You can also probably find gingerbread house kits in stores, because companies have figured out that people will decorate houses year-round and they’ve started making kits for multiple holidays.
Graham cracker houses are also a good option if you’re tired of baking after the holidays, or if you don’t want to buy a kit.
To see an article about building a small gingerbread house, plus a downloadable template, click here: How To Make A Small Gingerbread House.
I made this house with the same template, so if you want to follow this pattern you can do the same thing with your own house that you make from that pattern.
After baking and building the house, the decorating can start!
How to decorate a Valentine’s Day gingerbread house.
To decorate a Valentine’s Day gingerbread house, concentrate on the iconic colors and designs like hearts and lace to create your design.
Use candy that’s available around the holiday to add to the overall look, but if you can’t find any just use red, white and pink candy. You can also paint some of the house with gold or silver luster dust as an extra embellishment.
I decorated this house in a sampler style, so each section is different. It makes it a little crazy, but I’m fine with that.
For the three sections of the house that were more monochromatic and less colorful, I used white fondant, some lace molds, conversation hearts, a chocolate heart candy, and gold luster dust paint.
The front of the house was decorated with fondant that I put in a silicone mold, then painted gold.
I painted a chocolate heart candy gold and stuck that to the door, then I put white conversation hearts around it.
One side of the roof also had fondant that was put into a lace mold to make lace flowers, then those were applied to the roof after it was iced with royal icing.
The side below that part of the roof also had molded lace fondant on it, and I added a couple of rows of conversation hearts on that side.
For the colorful sides, I used conversation hearts, Pull and Peel Twizzlers, Jolly Ranchers, wrapped Rolos, red Lifesavers, and red M&Ms.
The roof on that side was completely covered with conversation hearts, which is a pretty common way to do a Valentine’s Day house.
The back of the house was completely iced in royal icing, then I pressed some pull-and-peel Twizzlers into the icing in the shape of hearts, and added conversation hearts inside of those.
I like that design a lot, it’s a little wacky. I also put red M&Ms in the empty spaces to fill them up, and added some red Jolly Ranchers at the bottom to extend the base a little so that it would match the other side.
The side had rows of red foil-covered Rolos, Lifesavers, conversation hearts, and chewing gum that I punched into heart shapes using a paper punch.
Not all of my paper punches worked for something as thick as a gum stick, so I had to just use the top of the heart shape since the gum wasn’t wide enough to make the whole shape!
Candy needed to decorate the houses.
The amount of candy that I needed to decorate each side varied a lot because some sections were completely covered in fondant. The chart that follows is a list of how much you would need to decorate an ENTIRE house in each style if you used the same template for the house pattern.
| House style | Candy needed to cover an entire house using the small gingerbread house template. |
| Lace-covered roof | Probably about 1/2-3/4 pound of fondant Silicone lace mold |
| Gold scrollwork front | 1/2 lb fondant 36 conversation hearts 1 heart chocolate candy for the door Silicone scrollwork molds Gold luster dust paint |
| Fondant lace side | 1/2 lb fondant 60 hearts |
| Hearts on the back | about 150 M&Ms 20 Jolly Ranchers 2 Twizzler pull and peels 50-60 conversation hearts |
| Side with red rows | 35 Rolos 35 Lifesavers 48 conversation hearts 24 sticks of gum |
| Roof with hearts | About 320 conversation hearts total: 102 conversation hearts for two roof sections 110-120 hearts for the sides 90-100 hearts for front and back |
This is an estimate for covering the entire house in each style of decoration. If you want to adapt or add a window or door, you might not need as much.
