In today’s post: Make an easy Valentine’s Day “gingerbread” house from graham crackers.
We love making gingerbread houses at Christmas time, but working with real gingerbread is just too much work to do more than once a year. So for other holidays, we make a cheater version of a gingerbread house using graham crackers instead.
Today I’ll show you the easy way to construct a “gingerbread” house for Valentine’s Day, along with tips to make sure it doesn’t collapse when your kids start decorating!
These simple little holiday houses are pretty quick to build and fun to decorate with whatever candy you like. I use melted white chocolate chips to glue them together, which is MUCH easier than making royal icing – and it holds like cement as soon as it’s dry!
Please Read This
Every time I share a graham cracker house tutorial, I like to share this ONE TIP: If you will be decorating houses with a young child (or if you are outnumbered by children, like I am), safe yourself a lot of hassle and GLUE THE HOUSES TOGETHER IN ADVANCE. The actual house construction is very simple for an adult or older child (8+). However, it requires about ten minutes of patience, which most younger kids just don’t have when they are anxious to start stuffing candy on a house.
If you are working with toddlers, preschoolers, or more kids than there are adults, you will have a much more pleasant experience if you just construct the houses in advance and let them harden up (10 minutes is all it takes) before you unleash the children for decorating. How do I know this? Because I have kids. And they have cried during holiday house making before. Don’t do that to yourself.
If your kids are a little older (8+), they may need a bit of help cutting the front and back pieces but should be able to glue the house together all on their own.
How to make a Valentine’s Day “gingerbread” house
I like to glue these Valentine’s Houses together using melted white chocolate chips. They are easier than making a batch of royal icing, taste better, and set up much faster. Just put some in a ziplock sandwich bag and microwave in 30 second interval to melt. Then snip off a tiny corner of the bag and “pipe” the white chocolate out to use as glue.
Valentine's "Gingerbread" House
Ingredients
- 4 Full Graham Crackers
- Melted White Chocolate Chips or Royal Icing
- Valentine's Candy
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Instructions
- Place one full graham cracker on a cutting board. Use a serrated knife to carefully cut diagonally across the top half as shown (a gently sawing motion works best). Cut diagonally the other way so the graham cracker has a triangle shape on top. Repeat with a second graham cracker.
- Cut the other two graham crackers in half so you have four graham cracker halves and two graham cracker halves with triangle shapes on top (they will support the roof).
- Lay one roof support cracker in between two graham cracker halves. Pipe a line of melted white chocolate (or royal icing) down each side of the graham cracker halves.
- Fold up each graham cracker half and press it again the edges of the roof support cracker. Hold for about a minute, then carefully lift up all three crackers to a standing position and insert the other roof support cracker.
- You now have the four walls put together. Pipe white chocolate or frosting along the top edges of all four crackers and place the two remaining cracker halves on as a roof, piping additional white chocolate along the peak of the roof.
- Let house stand for at least 10 minutes to set up, and then decorate with candy as desired.
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