Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day (and today is actually Galentine’s Day) and while we like all the romantic stuff, we’ve always felt that it was also a good opportunity to show how much you love everyone in your life. As a family we often have given each other Valentines and it’s certainly a great holiday for baking cute desserts to share.

For Christmas we had made tiny gingerbread house “mug huggers”, which we talked about in a Christmas baking post. The first time we tried to make them was a ridiculoulsy labor intensive experience because we cut everything out by hand, but THEN we discovered a great shop that sold these tiny cookie cutters. So we made them that way and didn’t want to kill ourselves. We saw she also sold this adorable heart version of the cookie cutter and had to get it.

The tricky part was the recipe since gingerbread is very sturdy and pretty much perfect for construction whereas sugar cookies and shortbread (which is more the flavor and color we wanted) aren’t so forgiving. Ultimately we had pretty good success with this no-spread sugar cookie recipe (the “no-spread” party being important so the pieces don’t change too much during baking). Tip: after cutting out the front and back doors, we realized that it was best if we ‘opened’ the door a bit by pulling the sides just slightly, otherwise some of them weren’t quite wide enough to fit on a regular mug. We had more breakage than with gingerbread, but still ended up with plenty (plus the broken ones just have to get eaten while you’re working… too bad).

Most importantly though, to make sure they looked amazing we stopped at our favorite decoration supply store Home Cake Decorating and went to town making them look like tiny romantic elf homes.