Making your own gingerbread house is a very fun thing to do as a family and SO much better (tasting, fitting, looking) than any kit I've ever tried. I got most of my instructions for building the house and the gingerbread/frosting recipe here.
Here's how we did it:
First we made the gingerbread and rolled it out on parchment paper.
I then cut out some shapes in card stock and we cut them out with a plastic knife. You can get the patterns on the website or just cut your own like we did as long as they fit together with paper they'll fit together when they are cooked. Don't push down too hard on the card stock because it'll stick to the gingerbread.
Then cut out the shapes with scissors and place them right on the cookie sheet. It makes it SO easy and you don't have to pull off the gingerbread from the paper. Once you cook it they come right off!
With any extra gingerbread you can make some cookies- people or dogs as we did:)
Once the gingerbread is cooked you then wait for it to cool and get a bunch of your favorite candies and you're ready to decorate!
Peel the paper off the pieces and trim any extra edges.
Make some royal icing (it takes a while, but is very strong) and start putting the house together- it's usually good to have two people for this job.
We used a freezer bag with a hole in the edge to pipe the frosting and had fun putting candy on all of it!
A fun holiday tradition and actually pretty easy... just a little time-consuming.
Have fun and good luck!
