Gingerbread House Patterns and Tutorials 2014

Gingerbread Houses are a wonderful family activity at Christmas time. Store-bought gingerbread kits are convenient, but the truth is, the cookies usually taste stale and dry. Making your own gingerbread for the houses allows you some creative latitude, and the finished product actually tastes great after it's decorated.

When it became time to make gingerbread houses last year, I read through all the previous posts and used the tips and tricks from all the posts when I made the gingerbread houses. There is a bunch of great information in each of these tutorials.

The best suggestion was to make the gingerbread several days before we put the houses together. Splitting up the baking portion from the putting-together portion made the activity manageable.

If you haven't already done so, you can read our main post here: Gingerbread Houses, pattern and a tutorial. You can also read Tiffany's wonderful update from 2012 here: Gingerbread Houses Revisited

We have patterns posted for three sizes of houses:

• Small Gingerbread Houses [Download the Small Gingerbread House Pattern and Instructions PDF File]
• Medium Gingerbread Houses — Easy Index Card Size
• Large Gingerbread Houses [Download the Large Gingerbread House Pattern and Instructions PDF file]

Here are two recipes for cookie dough you can use:

• Gingerbread Cookies recipe (This is the one we use most frequently. Very yummy! Makes about 6 small houses.)
• Gingerbread Cookies--Nauvoo Scoville Bakery recipe

Here are three recipes for icing. The ideal would be to use Royal Icing, which dries hard, to glue the house together, and then to use the delicious decorator's icing to glue on candy and decorate the houses. Or use the Buttercream Icing, which is very stable at room temperature for a long time, which is ideal for Gingerbread Houses!

• Royal Icing (You really only need about 1/3 recipe – one egg white – to put together 6 small houses. You would need more if you are using it to stick on the candy as well.)
• Decorator's Icing (My favorite buttercream. It has a nice flavor and texture, sort of like mousse, but works very well for decorating. There is a chocolate version here.)
• Buttercream Icing