Pro Tips for Building a Gingerbread House (Published 2022) (2024)

FAQs

How to make gingerbread houses stick together better? ›

Then take your gingerbread house pieces, dip the edges in melted sugar and hold them together for a few seconds. That's it! The sugar hardens quickly and creates an solid base for tons and tons of decorating.

Keys to gingerbread house success

Make the pieces as straight as possible for easier assembly. Use a royal icing recipe that holds up well and dries hard. Follow the recipe exactly for best results. If you double the recipe, expect it to take twice the time to make.

Festive wreaths and garlands are great for adding extra details, textures and color to your gingerbread house. Garlands can be used to decorate the roof or you can use them to dress up your side or front windows. Go more modern with your décor with a cute pom-pom wreath.

Gingerbread House Icing

Every house needs sturdy walls, right? Royal icing is the “glue” that holds the house together. It's also the glue adhering any candies to the walls and roof. As you can see in these photos, I covered the roof with royal icing before piping the buttercream on.

Before you jump to assembly, consider decorating your gingerbread-house cookies straight out of the box. We like this technique specifically for creating doors and windows, which can be hard to trace on an assembled house—piping icing onto a flat cookie from above can be far easier than doing so from straight on.

So to make sure our walls could stand strong, we sandwiched melted marshmallow cement between two graham crackers. The marshmallow adds weight, which helps stabilize the structure. It also acts as a sealant, ensuring that the cracker won't crumble.

Hot/liquid sugar syrup

Melting together sugar and water and heating it for long enough will eventually create an extremely hot sticky sugar syrup that you can use to stick key pieces together. The upside, it sets quickly and hard.

To make the faux snow concoction, I mixed powdered sugar and water in a gallon bag and cut the corner to dispense it (a wonderful and easy suggestion that my baker gave me). Last, after the powdered-sugar snow mix had dried, I topped it with finely chopped coconut, made easier by using a mini food processor.

Pick a solid base for your gingerbread house - either a flat cookie sheet, or a thick, sturdy piece of cardboard. If you want, line the base with aluminum foil or wax paper. Mortar the sides of the house with royal icing: Pipe a thick line of icing along a short end of one of the side pieces.

How do you join a gingerbread house together? ›

Pipe generous snakes of icing along the wall edges, one by one, to join the walls together. Use a small bowl to support the walls from the inside, then allow to dry, ideally for a few hours. Once dry, remove the supports and fix the roof panels on.

Bestgingerbreadhouses.com stated that the tradition of gingerbread houses began with the making of gingersnap cookies and was started in Germany. Gingerbread houses in Germany originated from bakers interpreting the description of a house from the story Hansel and Gretel.

The biggest tip for a professional-looking gingerbread house is to decorate the pieces before you build the house. This lets you make everything perfectly even, and prevents awkward slipping of icing down the sides. One caveat: You want the decorations to dry completely before you build the house.