Wow friends and family this holiday season with beautiful, edible architectural gingerbread wonders. They're classic Christmas decor and fun to create alone or with family. Free gingerbread house building templates and patterns give you a basic structure to start with and the rest of the gingerbread house decorating ideas are open to your imagination.
Gingerbread Chapel Pattern
When you look at a classic Christmas village display you see homes and iconic town buildings. Take inspiration from these villages and create an iconic chapel out of gingerbread. Because you'll be stacking, this pattern falls in the medium skill range. Use candies, icing, and other edibles to decorate your chapel.
Gingerbread Toad House Blueprint
Create an indoor, edible garden feeling complete with a little toad house when you use this unique pattern. Like those little garden decorations, this gingerbread toad house features short walls with a flat roof. The simple structure of this pattern is great for beginners. Add a dome to the roof with stacked candies or piled icing for a mushroom-inspired look. Create an entire garden setting when you place the house on a base decorated with candies to look like grass, flowers, and maybe even some little bugs.
Gingerbread Treehouse Template
If you're ready to defy gravity and challenge your gingerbread house skills, the treehouse pattern is perfect for you. You'll need to build a house and a tree trunk base to set it on. When decorating, consider covering the trunk section with brown icing and little brown jimmies to make it look like bark. Take it a step further and set the entire gingerbread structure on a base decorated with other natural-looking items like icing grass and stacked candy trees.
General Gingerbread House Pattern Directions
To use the templates, click on the image for the pattern you choose and print. If you have any trouble with the documents, check a helpful Adobe troubleshooting guide. Each pattern is scaled for a standard-sized house so you don't need to adjust any size settings unless you want to scale the house bigger or smaller.
- Print out the entire pattern; there are several pages with labels. The first page shows you what the final product should look like.
- Cut out each pattern piece along the outermost lines.
- Make or buy gingerbread dough and roll out to your desired thickness.
- Lay the pattern piece on top of the raw dough, keeping near edges when possible to allow for the most pieces from one section of dough.
- Trace around the pattern first or cut the shape out of the dough.
- Follow the directions inside each pattern piece to know how many of that piece you'll need. Combine and roll out dough as needed to complete the project.
- Bake the pieces and allow to cool completely.
- Prepare a surface to build your house on. You can use a cake plate or decorative cutting board if you have one. If not, cover a sturdy piece of cardboard with tin foil or green cling wrap.
- Reference the first page of the printable and the pattern pieces to assemble using icing as glue and decorate.
Gingerbread House Decorating Tips
Decorating your gingerbread house is the most exciting part of the whole project. Look at pictures of gingerbread houses to get decorating ideas for any pattern you select and use your own creativity to invent new decorations.
Creative Gingerbread Roof Ideas
You can use any color icing to pipe shingles or designs on your roof or you can use the icing to glue other candies on.
- Make heart-shaped shingles using with conversation heart candies by sticking them word-side down.
- Use Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal as shingles to get the cedar shingle look on your roof or even as your siding.
- Give your house a faux metal roof when you you add strips of Fruit Roll-Up from peak to edge. Where the strips meet, fold each up about an eighth of an inch and pinch together for an authentic look.
- Cut long, thin pieces of gum into squares to use as faded-looking matte shingles.
- Lay strips of ribbon candy on the roof to get the look of clay tiles.
Creative Gingerbread House Accessory Ideas
Give your gingerbread house unique features like window boxes or sconces.
- Create cute shutters on either side of each window by sticking the same colored Pez candies in a vertical column next to the window.
- Hang Candy Corn pointed side down on either side of the door for medieval sconces that look like they're lit.
- Make strands of icicle Christmas lights all around your house by piping the string then adding white oblong sprinkles.
- Starburst candies become soft and malleable when you work them with your warm fingers so you can stretch them out into larger squares used to make a sidewalk.
Candy Structures to Enhance Your Landscape
If you're creating a gingerbread and candy landscape, you'll need some sweet plants.
- Create a colorful forest by sticking rock candy sticks to your base.
- Stack a green Lifesaver, then a green and white Spearmint Starlight candy, then a green M & M to make a short, cute snow-covered tree.
- Make a palm tree by topping a peppermint stick with horizontal strips of green licorice.
- Stick about five green Sour Patch Kids to your base in a flower shape. Stack several rows of these where each row has one less candy, and you put each candy in the spaces from the row below it to create a snow-covered tree.
- Cut red Starburst candies into slices to make small, red bricks for paths or lining garden beds.
Build Your Dream Gingerbread House
Not everyone has the time or inclination to create a gingerbread house pattern from scratch. You can purchase a pre-made kit to assemble or check out more free online patterns. Patterns and templates help you create the gingerbread house of your dreams. Make your vision come alive in a unique Christmas decoration to share with friends and family for show or dessert.
