Create Easy, No-Bake Gingerbread Houses & Try This Great Icing Recipe

Honestly, I don't know how anyone bakes gingerbread and then gets the pieces to fit together. My three daughters and I have tried kits with ready make gingerbread and even then I can never get the icing with gingerbread houses to hold. The houses always collapse.

So now we do it the simple way. For the houses, I save boxes that range in size from those small ones Nerds come in to round oatmeal boxes. In November I start to save half-gallon juice and milk cartons. I also keep an eye out for cardboard squares or rectangles that are around a foot or more on each side for the base.

Candy for decorating accumulates from Halloweens and gingerbread houses past. My kids are in their twenties, so you can only imagine how many old sweets reside in the tins I store on a high, out-of-the-way shelf for our annual gingerbread house jamboree. See my recent Gingerbread House Photo Gallery for all sorts of fabulous decorating ideas.

The only time-consuming part of the effort is making the icing with gingerbread houses. I like the luxury of making a lot so each of us can have a large bowl. There may be easier recipes, but my biggest worry is that the icing will be too thin and the candy will just slide off the house. So below I'm including the tried and true icing we use, which is from a 1990 edition of Cooking Wizardry for Kids.

Step 1

Cover a 12-inch or larger square or rectangular cardboard base with tin foil or foil wrapping paper in a fun color. Even if you don't use any icing on the base, the silvery look adds sparkle.

Step 2

Select the box or juice/milk carton for your house, and slather the bottom of the container with icing. Then stand it up on foil-covered base. I like to set mine back rather than center it. This gives me room to make a winding candy path to the house.

Step 3

Working on one side at a time, spread some icing and attach graham crackers all around. This is your "gingerbread." For a different look, on one or more sides we stick just candy. My youngest daughter likes to make patterns with colored M&M's and often skips the graham crackers. Be sure to work on only one side at a time; otherwise the icing may become too dry to hold the candy decorations.

Another way to decorate, bypassing the smooth graham cracker look is to break the graham cracker in pieces, which gives more of a look of stone. Necco wafers also work well for a stone look.

Step 4

Also try Necco Wafers for a "slate" roof. Or you can use Big Red chewing gum, cut into small rectangles, to resemble tile or red brick.

Step 5

Now comes the fun part. Use the icing to glue candy to the graham cracker sides of the house. I have a favorite book I often refer to for ideas, Making Great Gingerbread Houses: Delicious Designs from Cabins to Castles, from Lighthouses to Tree Houses. I love just looking at the photos. You can also scan the Internet for creative ways to use candy and other food, for instance, Fruit Loops, sugar cubes, marshmallows (large and small), candy canes, pretzels, ice ream cones. Snyder's makes a square pretzel that work well as windows. My ambitious middle daughter sometimes makes a door by using a box cutter to carve it out of the milk carton (on three sides). Then she puts inside an evergreen sprig for a "tree."

One More Thing or Two

We've had great fun making these very same houses during other seasons. Once in the spring we invited all the neighborhood kids and made these houses with pastel-colored candies: lavender, yellow, baby blue, pale pink, light green. And for Halloween, of course, it's all about orange and black. It helps that M&M's now come in as many colors, it seems, as the biggest box of Crayola crayons.

We have fun when guests come, asking them to guess which one of us made each of the houses.

Icing Recipe

I triple this for four of us, so we'll have enough for snow on the base.

2 egg whites

½ teaspoon cream of tartar

pinch of salt

About 2 ½ cups sifted confectioner's sugar

Food coloring optional (you can add drops of color to a portion of the icing)

(We use paper bowls for the icing and plastic knives to spread it. Use damp paper towels over the icing to keep it moist)

Use an electric mixer to beat the egg whites, cream of tartar and salt at high speed. Beat until stiff peaks form.

Gradually add confectioner's sugar. Beat well after each addition. Add enough confectioner's sugar to make the icing thick enough for decorating the house. This icing needs to be thicker than ordinary cake frosting.

Keep the bowl of icing covered with a damp cloth or damp paper towel.

What ideas do you have for adding pizzazz to a gingerbread house? I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.

SEE MY GINGERBREAD HOUSE PHOTO GALLERY:

GINGERBREAD HOUSES . . . FUN, DECORATIVE & CAN BE MORE THAN A HOUSE

SEE THE AWESOME WHITE HOUSE GINGERBREAD HOUSE AND OTHER WHITE HOUSE DECORATIONS, INCLUDING THOSE OF BO