Gingerbread Houses

Making gingerbread houses isn’t difficult, and if you’re willing to spend a little time you can make small houses yourself instead of buying a kit. When you’re looking for a simple pattern for a small house, there are a lot of choices. This is the one that I use to make a little house that’s […]

There are a lot of tips and tricks that people use for making gingerbread houses, and I’ve been collecting them for a while. This is a collection of some of the tips that I’ve found that would be helpful for gingerbread house baking, construction, and decorating. I’ll continue to add to them as I find

Some gingerbread houses have designs that include bent or curved pieces, and the question of how those pieces are made comes up a lot. There are a few ways to bend gingerbread pieces, and I tried the after-baking bending method to see how it worked. To bend gingerbread after it’s baked, you need to prepare

When you build a gingerbread house, you definitely want it to be structurally sound and solid enough so that it isn’t going to fall apart! If it’s a smaller house, it usually won’t be a problem, but for larger houses with more complicated designs and multiple stories, it’s important to make sure that you’re building

There are a few ways to glue a gingerbread house together, but if you want a solid bond and you’re not concerned with keeping everything edible, you might have thought about using hot glue. Hot glue can be used to glue a gingerbread house together, but it makes the pieces where it touches inedible. The

When you’re sticking a gingerbread house together, you want it to stay in one piece fast and not fall apart as you’re decorating it. Different types of glues work better to accomplish this, so I’ve rounded up the pros and cons of four different types of edible glue for making and decorating the houses. So

Every December the videos of people using hot sugar to glue a gingerbread house together start to circulate online. And every year I shudder, thinking of all the severe sugar burns I’ve given myself over the years. Hot sugar is no joke, so should you use it to glue your gingerbread house together, or should

The classic way to glue a gingerbread house together is to use royal icing, which is a decorator icing that dries hard and acts as an edible glue. Royal icing isn’t the same as regular cake icing, so you need to make sure that you’re using the right thing! Using a hardening icing is important

When you’re making a gingerbread house you might be tempted to use regular buttercream icing, but you’ll be running some risks if you do! Using regular icing to assemble and decorate a gingerbread house can be risky because normal icing doesn’t dry hard, so it might not hold the house together. Store-bought icing and other

Humidity is the enemy of sugar and baked goods, so making a gingerbread house when it’s wet outside is a challenge. When I was a kid we lived in very humid places, and I thought that it was normal to use soup cans to prop your house up while it dried. I was also shocked