12+ Gingerbread House Designs: {Free Patterns & Ideas}

Plenty of inspiration will be found in this lovely collection of gingerbread houses that I found around the ‘net…most include pattern templates that you can download for free along with recipes. You’ll find lots of sweet ideas for decorating in this list!

More Tips & Ideas

These don’t include pattern pieces to download but they offer plenty of good tips, techniques and ideas for decorating.

Making A Village: No pattern pieces to download that I can find, but has a nice tutorial and suggestions for decoration ideas:

• Snow: melted white chocolate sprinkled with sparkling sugar and lined with silver dragees.
• Wreaths & Window Boxes: licorice whips & green peppercorns.
• Shutters & Lintels: sticks of chewing gum.
• Red Chimney & Door: dough tinted with food coloring (outline them and house joints with royal icing).
• Pathway: sunflower seeds, puffed millet, and dragees.
• Thatched Roof: All-Bran cereal lined with sticks of red gum.
• Eaves & Masonry: jelly beans.
• Window Frames: sticks of gum.
• Doorknobs: dragees.
• Windows: To create a warm glow, place hard candies on a lightly oiled nonstick sheet pan at 350°F until melted, 5 or 6 minutes. Do not let the candy bubble; remove it from the oven as soon as it has melted.
• Mortar: Royal icing is the “glue” that holds the gingerbread house pieces together and the embellishments in place.

Lessons Learned, Tips & Recipe: Offers a variety of tips when first getting started including…

• Plan on needing at least a couple days to make the house (for baking gingerbread, assembling house, decorating).
• Save an old pizza box and use the cardboard for template pieces.
• When first “gluing” the pieces together with royal icing, use heavy objects like canned goods and bottles of oil to hold the pieces tight together until the icing dries.

Much more available (plus another good article referenced with more tips here).

Ideas:

Some nice tips offered along with a quick tutorial on how to make lovely trees (the picture here is an unfinished version, see the link for completed trees with snow-capped branches).

More ideas shared: a fondant snowman, flood icing to make icicles (with #2 piping tip) and lots of glittery goodies made with disco dust.

Another goody to check out: Scandinavian House – Pepparkakstuga

Here’s a little treasure from Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House on the Prairie series)…

Laura’s Gingerbread Recipe:

1 cup brown sugar blended with
1/2 cup lard or other shortening.
1 cup molasses mixed well with this.
2 teaspoons baking soda in 1 cup boiling water
(Be sure cup is full of water after foam is run off into cake mixture).

Mix all well.

To 3 cups of flour have added one teaspoon each of the following spices: ginger, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, cloves; and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Sift all into cake mixture and mix well.

Add lastly 2 well-beaten eggs.

The mixture should be quite thin.

Bake in a moderate oven for thirty minutes.

Raisins and, or, candied fruit may be added and a chocolate frosting adds to the goodness.

(Source was a page found on hbook.com that is no longer online)