Making a Gingerbread Replica of Your Home

Last Updated on December 31, 2020 by Michelle

It’s become a Christmas Day tradition to make gingerbread replicas of something important to us… our first attempt was our farm, in gingerbread form, many years ago. Last year we made a gingerbread pick-up truck, and this week we created a gingerbread church.

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Our Church Building

While you know we live in an old farmhouse that was built in 1800, I haven’t shared much about our church building. It was built not too long after our old house, and it’s melodious bells have been chiming out the hour and half hour throughout our small, one-street town for well over a century.

I share a little insight about our church here, where I explain my multiple sources of income (on of which is a brick-and-mortar job, working as the pastor’s assistant) that help keep our homestead and sugarbush running.

Our church has long outgrown the sweet little historic building we meet in.

One thing I didn’t know when moving here 6 years ago? New England is a mission field. There are so few churches that preach true joy and hope from the infallible Word of God like folks hear coming out of our pulpit every Sunday. Yet New Englanders are ripe for hearing this joy known as the gospel.

Many families drive from over an hour away every Sunday.

So we’re working hard to bring as many folks in as will come, and we are also working hard at raising money to purchase a new-to-us building that will allow us to deepen our impact and welcome more in our pews every week.

Go here if you feel God leading you to help us reach more with the Good News here in New England.

Since this will, hopefully, be the last Christmas we celebrate in this small historic building we are now renting, my daughters knew they wanted to memorialize it in gingerbread and candy.

I share my complete recipe and the tricks of the trade we’ve learned along the years on the best ways to make a gingerbread replica of your home, or other important building, below.

My Gingerbread Recipe

Ingredients
1/3 cup shortening
1 cup brown sugar (packed)
1 ½ cups dark molasses
2/3 cup cold water

6 cups flour

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp salt

3 tsp cinnamon

Directions

Mix the first 3 ingredients well, then add in the water and mix more. Combine the final 4 ingredients and add them into the rest.

Once it’s well combined, place your dough in a bowl, cover, and refrigerate.

While your dough is chilling, you could start planning your building.

Roll dough out to roughtly 1/4″ thickness. Cut out your building pieces, making paper patterns for the items that you’ll need duplicates of so you have a stencil to easily make sure both sides of your roof are the same size and each side of the building is the same height.

I had a decent amount of extra dough left over after we created our church, measuring 6″ tall by 6′ wide by 8 1/2″ long (plus the steeple, wreaths, a picnic table, a tree, and a moose).

Bake in preheated oven, at 350, for roughly 15 minutes. Ideally you know your gingerbread is ready for construction if no imprint remains when you lightly touch a piece as you’re pulling it out of the oven.

Icing Glue Recipe

Ingredients

3 eggs whites

1 pound plus 2 cups confectioners sugar

½ tsp. cream of tartar

Directions

Beat the egg whites until they’re nice and fluffy. Then mix in the other two ingredients until very thick, so it can no longer drip off of your spatula.

You need this to be a cement for your walls, so you need it thick. Feel free to add more sugar if necessary to thicken it up.

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10 Tips for Construction of a Gingerbread Replica of Your Home (or church)

If your design is rather intricate, start days ahead by cutting out cardboard and gluing or taping it together to make sure your plans and measurements are correct.
Use paper to trace your cardboard pieces you designed with and use that to actually cut out your gingerbread. Your cardboard pieces can be a rough idea but then use neatly cut paper for the real deal. It’s much easier to work with paper than cardboard to make your actual pattern; save the rest of your cardboard for your base to build your gingerbread building on, if it’s sturdy enough.
Be sure you’re not creating any pieces that are too big to fit on your biggest cookie sheet. Not that I’ve almost done that or anything.
Try out this free online help with sketching your building plans.
Your dough will seem really hard when you take it out of the fridge. It will most likely crack when you initially try to flatten it. Patience and muscle power will allow you to roll it out, and you’ll be amazed at how smooth the dough becomes after a little diligent rolling.
Try cutting the gingerbread dough with a pizza wheel for ultra smooth edges, plus it’s easier to use than a knife to trace your paper patterns.
After the dough is baked, you can still gently use a serrated knife, or even kitchen scissors, to cut baked pieces down to the shape or size you want, or to smooth out edges (if you don’t use a pizza wheel to cut them).
While you can use cutting boards, large platters, and more for a base to build on, nothing beats a sturdy piece of cardboard covered in aluminum foil.
You definitely want a way to pipe on your icing. This is my favorite cake decorating tool, but bags and tips like these work well too.
Create braces for your main walls with heavy cardboard that you cut to fit. This helps the walls stay in place until the icing has hardened.

Why I Love Seeing Kids Building with Gingerbread

I have always had two hurdles when trying to create something, I struggle with noticing details and I’ve always had difficulty understanding how to translate a 2-dimensional image into something 3-dimensional. For instance, sewing. I was never good at holding a pattern in my hand and figuring out how on earth I could turn that pattern into a real-life shirt or skirt or cute halloween costume.

Since studies have shown that in general it is more challenging for a female to see in 3D than a male, and given that I’m a homeschool mom of 4 girls, I was always looking for fun ways to foster this skill.

When the girls were young I tried hard to do any activity like nature journaling, and building with legos and mini robots, that would help them bridge that gap in their learning style.

Creating a gingerbread creation of something they cared about in real life was a fantastic way to do this. And tastier than sewing.

Plus, kids who grow up making a grand ole edible buildings time and again will still want to spend an afternoon doing it with mom, a decade later. Bonus.

Inspiration When Making a Gingerbread Replica of Your Home

SNOW: use confectioners sugar as snow on top of icing

TABLE CLOTH: for “sheets” of color, melt gummy bears and squish them flat (Warning, this does get very sticky!)

TILES: for any panes of color (we did this for our church’s stain glass panes) roll out jujufruits and/or tootsie rolls

STEPPING STONE PATH: slice tootsie rolls into individual stones to create a path

PEOPLE: I like these cookie cutters that allow you to choose the height for a person that is best proportionate to your house’s dimensions.

ANIMALS: This is our moose cookie cutter, in a set that includes another favorite animal around here. But these may be more up your alley.

ROOF SHINGLES: My absolute favorite shingles are made from overlapping rows of Necco wafers or giant circle sprinkles like the ones we used on our church

WREATHS: I love these circular cookie cutters for cookies and biscuits and they work great for gingerbread wreaths, with so many sizes to choose from. We used the fluted sides of 3rd from the smallest (for the outer ridge of the wreaths) and the next smallest to cut out the center of the wreaths.

The list could go on and on, so please continue this list with YOUR ideas, in the comments.

Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. Psalm 127:1