If you are looking for an amateur professional gingerbread house decorator with lots of tips and tricks, look no further.

Building and decorating gingerbread houses is such a fun activity to do during the holidays. It’s something you can do at just about any age. You can put as much or as little effort into it as you want, and depending on the kit you buy, you don’t really need to be too “creative” to do them.

My family has been building and having gingerbread house competitions for at least the last five years so I have a few years worth of knowledge to share. It started off innocently enough with my little cousins, who at the time were around 6-11. Which means these tips are kid friendly. You’re welcome!

That first year, we only used the candy that came with the kit and we listened to Christmas music and just had fun.

But my older cousin and I got so into helping the kids create their houses, the next year my aunt got us one to decorate too. Which also led to us requesting extra candy. Once we created our masterpieces (which are pretty laughable looking back), we sent out our houses to our larger family to vote for their favorite. (I won the first year, thankyouverymuch.) 

Over the years, the competition grew. Our little cousins’ mom participated the one year. One year my aunt participated instead of just assisting. We stopped sharing ideas with each other. We started looking up ideas weeks in advance. It got serious. (In the name of fun, of course.)  

With all this being said, if you are looking for tips and tricks for your holiday gingerbread houses, even if you’re not trying to compete with your family, I have you covered. 

House We Use

Every year my aunt bought the same brand. They are less than $10 and came with frosting and some candy. For a link to the gingerbread house that is most similar to the one we used, click here: Classic Gingerbread House. The reason we like this brand is because it comes with a nice tray, the frosting is super strong so the houses last for a while. 

Last year (2020) my mom and I did the gingerbread houses by ourselves because we weren’t around family. We got a different brand and while it was fine, I think one of our houses came broken. We used the frosting to put it back together, but I don’t think we ever had issues with our favorite brand. 

This year, we got pre-built houses. And below I’ll get into tips for building, but I’m very excited to do the houses without needing to build them first. For a link to the pre-built houses, click here: Pre-Built Gingerbread House. While this house doesn’t come with the extra candy, I will take not needing to build the house over the candy because we typically get different candy.

Extra Decorating Items We Buy

Some of the kits come with candy, but if you want to get more candy, I’m going to list the items we buy each year because they create fun things 

• Shredded coconut for textured snow
• Green food color for trees
• Red food coloring for berries, and ornaments
• M&Ms
• Pretzel sticks (the short skinny ones)
• Marshmallows 
• Licorice (Peel apart kind)
• Frosting (The frosting that comes with the kit is great for securing the house and large items, but it’s not very conducive to decorating.)
• Sprinkles to act as sparkling snow, or ornaments on trees or lights.
• Brown Jelly Belly candies (One year we used these as rocks/stones.)

Five Decorating Tips

1. Make sure you let your structure dry before your start decorating. If you are doing these with kids and you care about the houses staying together (or you think it would end in a melt down if their house fell apart), this is important. We realized too late that the adults should have built the houses and let them dry before we even had the kids come to the table to do them. With that being said, if you are more about the process than the product, ignore this tip and just have fun with it.
2. Use the frosting that comes in the kit for the structure and for anything heavy you want to add. Regular canned frosting is strong enough for most of the other decorations and won’t make your house as heavy.
3. If you are building your own, make sure it’s not humid in your house. One year, we built them the weekend after Thanksgiving when we were having a rather warm day, and the windows were open and our houses fell apart. The roofs did not want to stay on. In that case, we just held them together for a lot longer than normal.
4. We have never done this, but looking back, I can see the benefit. If you want to do something fancy, do some of the decorating before you build. For instance, my all white house, I should have done the pretty lines in the front before I put the house together. It would have been MUCH easier.
5. Have fun. I’m not sure when our family will do these houses again, but some of my favorite memories are my cousins and I all doing these houses. We would spend a whole day on them. There wasn’t any rush. And while there were some major melt downs a time or two, I can barely remember those over the happy memories.