A few years ago, my husband and I decided to do something completely different for Valentine’s Day. It’s always super busy, finding a babysitter is not always simple, and we decided we could always go to a nice dinner on a different night. And so we made Valentine’s Day a family day!

I actually really love it. I try to do a fun breakfast, like red velvet cinnamon rolls, and then we do a candlelight dinner with the kids. I pull out the nice China, we make homemade pizza, and I get a small box of chocolates for each kid (just the $1 heart boxes from the grocery store). And then, we end the night with a Valentine treat board!

At first I put treats in different sized glass jars, but a few years ago I graduated to boards, and it’s worked really well! You can get away with smaller amounts, and it just looks so fun and impressive- especially to young eyes!

The great thing about boards is that they really aren’t too hard to put together. You can literally just throw everything on a board in random piles, and it still will draw out gasps of delight from your young audience. Here’s one such board:


But you can also line things up, and use heart shaped cookie cutters to hold small candies to give your board a little more structure and make it look a little more organized:


In both cases, I just used what I had on hand, plus a few fun things I found at the store. But you can definitely get much fancier!

Try doing a board in just one color! Pink or red would both be quite easy to throw together, and you’ll have varying shades of treats to give your board some depth and contrast so it will still look really neat! If you don’t like the idea of just one color, you could do white with a splash of red, or varying shades of pink and purple- whatever aesthetic you please!

You could focus on fruits and chocolate. Chocolate covered strawberries are a Valentine’s Day staple! You could also add raspberries with white chocolate chips (just stick them in the hole on top!), you could dip blueberries in chocolate and freeze them, add squares of Ghiradelli raspberry chocolate, anything that combines the flavors of fruit and chocolate!

You could do a cookie board! Strawberry wafers, raspberry chocolate Milanos, heart shaped sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies with pink and red sprinkles or drizzled with pink melted chocolate, Oreos dipped in white melted chocolate and sprinkled with heart sprinkles, those delicious pink and white sprinkled animal cookies- the sky’s the limit!

You could focus on a fondue board! If you have a pot of melting chocolate, your board could consist of a variety of things to dip- strawberries, pineapple cubes, cinnamon bears, pretzels, Oreos, cubed angel food cake, whatever you want!

And you can always just go look through the seasonal aisle for inspiration! Maybe a particular candy is really calling your name, and you build around that! Maybe you just throw together all of your family’s favorites and a theme presents itself; the great thing about boards is that there are no rules! You can be as fancy or simple or small or big or themed as you want!

What would be on your ideal Valentine’s Day charcuterie board? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!

    Camille Hoffmann
    Monthly Newsletter Contributor since 2014
    Email the author! camille@dvo.com