Is there anything more iconic than making gingerbread houses with kids during the holidays? Kids love making their own unique gingerbread houses, but it’s even easier and kid-friendly when you use graham crackers instead of traditional gingerbread.
And the kids just eat the candy anyway, so why not save yourself the trouble?
Follow along for our best tips on how to make a graham cracker gingerbread house recipe for kids.
Gingerbread House Recipe for Kids Using Graham Crackers
If your family is anything like ours, you don’t have time to bake fresh gingerbread to make a gingerbread house. And gingerbread house kits can get expensive (or, you forgot to buy them, oops).
So, in that case, the next best thing is to build a gingerbread house recipe for kids that uses graham crackers!
Follow along with our easy tutorial to build your own adorable graham cracker gingerbread house.
What you’ll need for your gingerbread house recipe using graham crackers
- Graham crackers (multiple boxes, because the crackers break easily)
- Cookie icing (just white, or multiple colors if you feel fancy! We like to use Wilton cookie icing when we can get it)
- Assorted hard candies (we used this mix)
- Gumdrops
- Coconut flakes
Supplies used in this post:
Making Gingerbread Houses
The most important thing to remember when making gingerbread house recipes with kids is that it won’t be perfect.
If you allow for mess and hiccups, you won’t be stressed and everyone will have a better time.
Cutting the graham crackers
The key to any graham cracker crust is angles. If your angles are off, your house won’t work.
If you want to make the traditional house shape, use this photo as a guide for how to cut your house.
You’ll need:
- 2 full sheets for the roof
- 2 3/4 sheets for the sides
- 2 angled pieces for the other two sides
I cut our crackers with a big, sharp butcher knife. This worked pretty well, but even so, a lot of our crackers broke. We had quite the pile of broken crackers! These will make a good graham cracker crust for our Christmas pies!
Building the house
Kids hate waiting, so I recommend doing this part in advance and letting it dry before the kids decorate their houses.
I found the easiest way to build the house was to place an outline of icing for the four base walls of the house onto the plate.
Then I stacked the houses on the icing base and glued the sides together (with the pointed ends between the flat sides).
And finally, once that set up for about 20 minutes, I added the roof.
Your roof may need to be held in place with a cup or something while it dries to keep it from sliding off.
One of our houses had a big gap, so we just added another cracker on top.
Decorating the houses
When making gingerbread houses, the best part is decorating the houses. If you’re using cookie icing, a little bit is usually enough to secure the candies to the gingerbread houses for kids. We found if we applied the icing, waited a couple of minutes, and then put the candies on, we could put them just about anywhere.
Some may prefer to use homemade royal icing when making gingerbread houses… It seems to stick even better, but right now.. with this busy season we are all for bought versus homemade.
We used a number 1 tip to add on our windows and doors, and a number 2 for the icicles and attaching any candies to the houses.
Let your houses completely dry before eating or displaying.
Making gingerbread houses – Activities to pair:
Print out these cute gingerbread tracing pages to work on those fine motor skills.
Use excess peppermint candy to do the fizzing science experiment.
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