Tradition. I love our family traditions. We have several traditions that incorporate Christmas and the holiday season. This one started many years ago, but has grown as our kids have gotten older. Decorating a gingerbread house started several years ago at our house. It was actually a special activity that Jason did with the kids. He’d assemble the house and be in charge of the frosting and the kids would help place candies on it.

This post contains some affiliate links.

Up until this year, we’ve always bought a pre-made kit. (Tip: you will probably need to buy or make different frosting, other than what comes in the kit – it’s usually pretty hard, and I would imagine old.). The tradition started with one gingerbread house for the whole family. After a few years, we out grew that because everyone wanted to be able to do more. Then one year we bought a kit that had four mini houses. That was fun, but not nearly enough activity and involvement for each kid. So, last year we everyone got their own full size box. It actually worked really well! (Finding space to put them all the completed houses on display is another story….)

Against their requests, I never let the kids eat the gingerbread from their houses. 1. I had no idea what was really in it. 2. It was probably really old. 3. We usually adhere the kits with hot glue…therefore, voiding most of the edibility. So this was the year…..

This was the year we made our own. From scratch. Gingerbread, frosting, and all. We bought a variety of candies and treats and had a great time. Each kid was in charge of their own house from start to finish (some needed a little help attaching the roof, but that’s it). They each. made their own dough, rolled it out, use the cookies cutters, baked, assembled, and decorated. Besides a little extra mess….there wasn’t a whole lot of extra responsibility put on me. I was just the Gingerbread Foreman, watching over it all. And bonus! For the first time, I got to make and decorate my own gingerbread house.

I have no idea what our final cost was per house. I was curious on the price comparison between homemade and bought, but I didn’t keep track. Honestly, if you have the time (because you have to wait a bit from baking, to assembling, to decorating to complete each step) and interest, homemade made this project that much more special.

Scope out the candy aisle and you’ll find a variety of ideas. I got a lot of sprinkles, jimmies, and colorful candy balls on sale at Michaels. We also used mini marshmallows, M & Ms, peppermint discs, mini candy canes, coconut and gum drops. You could also use pretzels and cereal as well as other candies. Tip: toothpicks are a handy tool for getting things to stand up or to stick together.

This is the gingerbread recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, that we used and it worked really well! Note if you look close enough, you can tell parts of our gingerbread are different colors….that my friends is because we ran out of molasses mid making. The deep, dark color is bootstrap molasses and the lighter brown color is “plain” molasses. Both seem to taste pretty good, according to my kids and I think, the the color variety turned out pretty cool.

Also on Sally’s Baking Addiction site she shares how she cuts her housing pieces by hand. We used this cookie cutter set, so the houses would be bigger…note that you may need another batch of dough versus what she portions out because her houses are smaller.

Trying to move these big dough cut outs after we rolled them on the counter (we used a plastic placemat to reduce sticking), was a challenge. So, we learned two things make this easier. One, move the whole slab of dough, after you roll it, before you cut, (we slid it off the placemat on to the cookie sheet) – then cut it with the cookie cutters, directly on the cookie sheet and remove excess. In case we struggle with the dough so much that we ended up baking the dough slab for about 8 minutes, then cutting it out, then finish baking. That sort of wasted the dough, but it was eaten as tasty mishaps. Whatever ends up working for you, use parchment paper. It’ll makes baking and not sticking to the pan, much easier. A couple of pieces ended up with so much flour on them from the rolling out process that when decorating, the frosting didn’t want to stick. That was really just a kid, not understanding how much flour was needed, but you can keep that in your pile of notes.

We also used Sally’s Baking Additions’s Royal Icing Recipe as the “glue” to assemble the houses and I was very pleased. This is also the recipe we ended up using for the decorating, but with half the meringue powder. In the past the “glue” and the frosting have been a struggle sometimes as it wouldn’t hold or stuff would just start sliding off. We’ve had our share of collapsed gingerbread houses, hence using the hot glue instead of frosting in the past. When you’re ready to add your frosting to the your piping bag, use a tall glass to hold the bag. Put the bag inside the glass, open the top around it and you have and easy way to fill your piping bag.

You could certainly change the cake decorating tips on your frosting bags to pipe different designs. That’s how we started, but it quickly was decided that the bag snipped off at the end was really all we needed.

Creating space for a new subdivision development of six gingerbread houses in our house provided a creative challenge, but considering the kids get to eat them this year, the houses may not be around long. (wink, wink). If you decided to create your own family gingerbread house, tag me on Instagram at the_rainbow_radish . I’d love to see them! Of course these could be created any time of year, Valentine’s Day houses, Birthday Houses, when you build an actual new house – get creative!

Happy baking. Happy decorating. Happy family memory making.

Make sure to watch the Gingerbread House Tour Video, below, it’s hilarious (my video skills are starting to get better), If you click on the gear, you can speed it up.

Share your family traditions in the comments.