Lisa Anderson - No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids

Making no-bake gingerbread houses is easy, fun, and best of all, fast! This book will show you how to make houses, castles, cottages, and more using graham crackers, cookies, ice cream cones, waffle bowls, and candy. Theres no need to mix dough, roll it out, bake it, and wait for it to harden. The house structures in this book take only minutes to make, meaning you can get to the decorating more quicklyand thats the best part. Before you begin, you just need to know a few tips. Then youll be on your way to having fun!

A large piece of cardboardat least 1 foot by 1 footis the best base to build your house on. Its sturdy enough to pick up so that you can move your house easily. Be sure to cover your cardboard with waxed paper or aluminum foil so the frosting doesnt seep through.

Even if the house is small and doesnt take up much room on the cardboard, youll still want a large base so that you have plenty of room for decorating. The instructions for most of the houses in this book suggest that you spread icing around the house, such as green for grass or white for snow. Covering the whole cardboard base with icing helps your house look nice and neat.

While not all the houses in this book are made with graham crackers, most of them are. Building structures out of graham crackers requires a few tricks.

Most houses in the book require that you cut graham crackers into shapes or smaller pieces. Instead of trying to break them with your hands, have an adult use a serrated knife, such as a steak knife, to gently saw the cracker along the lines until the unwanted piece breaks off. If you try to break them with your hands, the pieces will usually break off unevenly.

The diagrams for each house will show you the sizes and shapes of the graham crackers you need. The blue parts of the diagram are the pieces of the crackers that need to be cut off and thrown away.

For many of the houses, you will need to glue two or more graham crackers together with icing to make a larger front, side, back, or roof piece. To help the pieces stay together, you will need to glue a quarter graham cracker across the seam, as shown in Diagram 1. This will help you make larger and more interesting houses without worrying about them falling apart. When you put the house together, make sure the quarter crackers are on the inside of the house.

Diagram 1

Making gingerbread houses requires special icing called royal icing. It is made with egg whites, water, and powdered sugar, and it is very strong, like glue. It dries to a hard candy-like finish that will last for months. You can use either raw egg whites or meringue powder (which has dried egg whites) to make the icing. While both versions make equally strong icing, I prefer using meringue powder because its easier to use and safer to eat than raw egg whites. You can find meringue powder at craft or cake decorating stores.

Beat the egg whites and cream of tartar together until the meringue has formed stiff peaks (meaning when you lift the beaters out of the meringue, it stands up straight and doesnt fall over). Beat in the powdered sugar, 1 cup at a time, until mixed together and smooth.

Beat the meringue powder and water together until the meringue has formed stiff peaks (meaning when you lift the beaters out of the meringue, it stands up straight and doesnt fall over). Beat in the powdered sugar, 1 cup at a time, until mixed together and smooth.

Tinting the icing with food coloring is a fun and easy way to add more color to your houses. Gel food coloring works the best because it is super concentrated and makes deep, bright colors. You can find gel food coloring in most grocery stores, but the gels at craft and cake decorating stores come in many more colors and are even more concentrated.

When tinting your icing, use a craft stick or toothpick to add just a tiny bit of gel to the icing. A little bit goes a very long way. You can always keep adding more, but you cant add less!

The easiest way to use the icing to decorate your house is to spoon some of it into a quart-size ziplock bag. Squeeze the air out of the top, then seal the bag. Double-check and make sure it is completely sealed or else the icing will come out the top when you squeeze the bag. Cut off a bottom corner of the bag and squeeze the bag to push the icing through the hole. The smaller the hole, the thinner the line when youre piping the icing. Youll usually want a thinner line when decorating, but you can use a thicker line when gluing the house together.

Any icing that is left in the bowl needs to be covered with plastic wrap so that the plastic wrap is touching the surface of the icing. Icing that is exposed to air will turn hard quickly and you wont be able to use it.

You can store royal icing in the fridge for a few days.

The projects in this book have suggestions of what candy to use so that your house looks the same as the one in the photo. But if you have an idea for a different color or shape of candy for the house youre making, go for it! The best part of making gingerbread houses is using your imagination and playing with different candies to come up with a cool design thats all your own. You can use any candy you want, with one exception: taffy. After taffy is unwrapped, it will eventually melt and run down the sides of your house. Trust meit doesnt look good!

Now that you know some tips and tricks and important information, go have some fun, be creative, and build some really cool no-bake gingerbread houses.