Mistakes Everyone Makes When Baking Gingerbread Houses

It's beginning to look a lot like gingerbread house season. And what better way to celebrate our favorite time of year than by not totally whiffing it on a made-from-scratch gingerbread house? For the first time. Ever.

Listen, this (drawing a big circle around a random spot in the air) is a safe space. No one among us hasn't dropped the ball on a gingerbread house or two. Perhaps literally. We get it. Gingerbread houses are finicky, the icing is never quite right, and why spend all this time gluing candy to a house when we could just put the Kit Kat straight into our mouths and forget the annoying house part altogether?

Let's make gingerbread houses not stressful. Not sure how long to bake the gingerbread? Do you have house pieces that don't fit? Is there an icing nest in your hair, and yet none of it's sticking to your house? And how does a dinosaur fit into this whole thing? Grab your piping bag and the biggest cup of hot cocoa you can find. We're getting real about how to avoid the most brutal gingerbread house-building mistakes — and what to do if there's no turning back.

You're building a house, people. You're going to need some kind of strategy so it goes as smoothly as possible. Making a gingerbread house from scratch requires some extra forethought. At least, more than you need for crushing one of those store-bought kits. Stay strong. Just give yourself plenty of time for various elements to bake, cool, and set — and then also a me-time break where you pour yourself another mug of hot chocolate and crank up the Frank Sinatra.

Double-check your gingerbread recipe for extra time suckers like "chill the dough." Many recipes call for cooling it for two hours in the fridge, or even up to several days. This is meant to lessen the molasses' stickiness and to make rolling out the tacky dough that much easier. You'll also need to completely cool the house shapes, post-bake. There will also likely be a timeframe listed in which your house will need to set in its final shape. Walls get iced together first, then, once the roof is in place, the whole thing might require hanging out overnight to maintain its house-iness. Are you familiar with the slip-n-slide roof and walls situation as you try to attach the candy? Perhaps a chimney or frosted winter pine succumbing to Earth's gravitational pull? Yeah. This keeps all of that from happening.

Now that you have your perfectly baked house pieces (sized down into a mini-scaled likeness of your human-sized house, duh), don't throw all your hard work away by assembling everything as is. Depending on the ingredients, your dough may have spread a little in the oven since you last saw it. No problem. Once you pull your pieces out of the oven, move them off the hot baking sheet, and quickly lay your cardboard template on top of the warm gingerbread. If anything's amiss, gently cut off the extras with a knife. Once the gingerbread cools, you're ready to assemble.

Okay, so you're saying your gingerbread already cooled and you're just now realizing your shapes aren't square? Easy breezy. You can gingerly (gingerbread jokes!) cut straight edges with a serrated knife, or, for smaller jobs, you can refine lumpy shapes and edges by sanding them with a cheese grater. Sorry, did we just invent a new food? Pulverized gingerbread? Either way, we're using it as the "mulch" in our gingerbread house landscaping design.

Ever hit turbulence on a flight and watched your fun-sized snack mix glide across your tray table into 14B's no-go zone? Replace the airline peanuts with your stunning gingerbread house, because it will be heading for the floor unless you ice its home base. People, it's sweet, delicious super glue. Don't fight it.

This hot tip goes for literally any serving platter, ever. From a flimsy paper plate to a Waterford Crystal footed cake stand. Ice. That. Ish. And don't look back — even if you're using a wooden cutting board. Your future edible home needs a strong foundation of sticky, icing snow (or, snow-covered in crushed graham crackers if you're doing a beach house). Trust us, it still looks cute, even if that extra icing is mostly functional.

If you're working on a paper base of some kind (cardboard and the like), your house can also leave a dark stain from the fats in the gingerbread. Covering the ground with a generous schmear of icing covers up mistakes or budget materials, and secures your gingerbread house better than a Ring cam.

We've been preaching the gospel from the pulpit at Our Lady of St. Gingerbread, about letting your icing dry before doing anything else. But just for one second, pretend like you weren't paying attention to any of that. And, whatever you do, don't let the icing set before you get that candy on there.

We too are vulnerable to getting so caught up in the icing part, that we completely space on adding the candy before it's too late — and the icing becomes too hard to be workable with candy. Yes, a naked iced gingerbread house is a look (for a sort of Scandinavian vibe), but, we already bought 20 pounds of peppermints, and, dang it, we're using every last one of them.

This scenario sounds disastrous, but already-dry icing is easy to avoid. Just work in small portions, applying icing and candy as you go. Say you do an entire window (cutie Tic Tac windowsill and all), and then move on to the door. Or, you work in rows to shingle the roof. And no worries if you've got too much icing happening at once. Just remove the icing with a sharp edge or knife, and get right back to decorating.

This one's for the warriors who bravely cut windows into their gingerbread house pieces — instead of just icing them and leaving the interior occupants trapped in a gingerbread escape room. But you're not gonna leave a hole in the wall, are you? No. You're gonna class it up with a window pane.

Leave all the other houses in the dust by adding some serious Jolly Rancher curb appeal. You can use whatever hard candy you have, just as long as it's the transparent type. Once your gingerbread wall pieces are fully cooled after their bake, lay them flat on top of parchment paper, place a whole Jolly Rancher (or the crushed pieces of one) in each window, and throw it back in the oven for a few minutes to melt your new windows into place. You can coax any reluctant candy to the edges of the window with a toothpick. Let that cool, and boom — let there be light.

Of course, most Jolly Ranchers are going to create somewhat of a stained glass window vibe, thanks to their vibrant colors (we see you, green apple, blue raspberry, and watermelon). But if you're going for a realistic glass look, definitely hunt down the white-ish, clear pineapple candies. They are as close to the real deal as humanly possible in the gingerbread world. Add a frosty look with a dusting of powdered sugar, and the blue ribbon goes to you.

If you've never blasted a gingerbread house with an ice age's worth of snow and icicles, you're definitely missing out. Extra snow is by far the number one way to hide any structural issues or design flaws your little biscuit hovel might have.

Grab your piping bag, a flat spatula, and any remaining icing. You can also work with powdered sugar and even coconut flakes. Anything goes. Want the shimmering, glittery sheen of real snow? White sparkling sugar looks just like the real thing. And tastes a lot better. Oh, c'mon, the '80s "Christmas Story" kids. We all know what snow tastes like.

Fat icicles do the work of hiding mismatched roof seams, and drafty cracks in the walls or windows. Thick snow drifts make a festive and functional design element for bloopers around the base of your house. Of course, if you went for a winter-scape theme, a dusting of powdered sugar over the whole thing adds that extra touch, no matter how flawless the house is.

So you've finally completed your dream house. Well done. Whoa, whoa, whoa, don't just plunk it on the kitchen table with the junk mail and whoever's hat knitting project that is. Here's where you can go from gingerbread house to gingerbread home sweet home, by displaying your work like it was always destined to be.

Number one, no refrigerating. Instead of preserving your masterpiece, the fridge air actually softens the gingerbread to the point where it crushes in on itself, and the candy dissolves into a rainbow-stained mess. Your best bet is to display your gingerbread house at room temp. But, of course, you've gotta do it in style.

If your decorated house is on the smaller side, a domed cake stand is a perfect solution to keep your work protected from dust, pets, and maybe candy capers — while also enjoyed throughout the season. If you've got a taller design, snag a sheet pan and decorate it enough to make your house feel comfy and cozy. An upside-down fish bowl can also do the trick of making your gingerbread house look like a snow globe. You can also use the lid of a jar, topped with the jar itself if your house is small enough. As they say on "The Great British Baking Show," "Ready, get set, bake!"