Decorating gingerbread houses is one of our favorite holiday projects—it’s fun for the whole family and the finished product is beautiful enough to eat! To help provide inspiration for this year’s cookie cottage crafting, we invited Angie Dudley of the wildly popular baking blog Bakerella to give her very first gingerbread house a whirl using supplies sold exclusively at Target. See how she did it, below.

Happy happy holidays! I’ve been playing house for A Bullseye View with a fun and festive take on Target’s Build-Your-Own Gingerbread House Kit. I love to bake during the holidays, but I realized that I’ve never made a gingerbread house before. I don’t think I’ve ever decorated one either. That was really surprising to me with how much I enjoy baking for my website and how much I love to get creative for the holidays. That’s perfectly okay though, because this awesome kit was the easy answer to all my cookie cottage dreams. 

Here’s what comes inside the kit. The cookie parts: A front and back house shape, two side walls, two roof pieces, a door with two pieces to make an overhang and a little chimney piece. The kit also comes with candies and gumdrops to decorate as well as royal icing and decorating tips to use to glue everything together. 

 And in the holiday section of Target, you can find all these fun candies, sprinkles and sugars to choose from, too. I’ll show you how I used some of them in a minute. But first, let’s build a house.

It’s really simple. The kit comes with a cardboard rectangle that you can use for support. Use the royal icing to attach the cookie pieces together following the directions on the box and your house will be standing proudly in minutes. Make sure to let dry before you start decorating. 

Expert tip: If your cookie breaks before assembling, you can use melted chocolate candy coating to glue it back together. Apply candy coating to the broken edges and then press them back together.  Wipe off any excess candy coating on the front side. Lay face-side down on wax paper and apply more coating on the back/inside of the house, where the seams are, to give it more stability when upright. Let it dry completely and you can cover up any seams with candies or icing when decorating. 

To make things less messy, use a mini cupcake pan to sort out your sprinkles and decorations.

I started by decorating the top using red and white gumballs. The roof is dotted with chewy sour candies for their size and color. Swooping scallops were piped with the royal icing before adding cinnamon imperials to finish the look. 

For the front of this sweet little house, I used royal icing to attach snowflake sprinkles from the Noel Blend and spell out the word JOY.

For the windows, I applied icing and then wiped it off to give the window panes a frosted look. 

To dress the windows, I piped the panes with royal icing and attached two fruit-flavored candies on either side for shutters. Then I attached Holly Jolly sprinkles to the bottom to create garland-lined windowsills. 

I piped over the front door to look like snow and instead of using the two rectangular pieces for an overhang, I attached them to the front to create the look of double doors. How cute are those Christmas tree candies from Target’s Holiday Candy Kit as knobs! The doors are decorated in royal icing and sprinkled with sugar crystals before attaching the trees. Make sure to let the royal icing set before attaching them to the house.

To give the doors a little more drama, I used a thick candy cane broken in two pieces to place on either side of the entrance. You can pipe royal icing on top of the candy cane and then press in a white gumball. Sprinkle white sugar crystals on the icing for a snowy look and hold it in place until set. When dry, attach to the cardboard base with royal icing.

The little peppermint above the door was made by applying swirled royal icing to the front of one of the chewy sour candies using a toothpick.

To finish off the front, I added a few more Holly Jolly candies to make a sweet little wreath from the O in JOY.

Oh the joy…and so much of it. I hope this little gingerbread house kit inspires you to get creative with candy and construct your cutest cookie cottage ever. 

xo Bakerella

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