7 Award Winning Gingerbread House Hacks

Gingerbread. It’s science. It’s art. It’s pure seasonal magic.

At some point everyone finds themselves drawn to give building a gingerbread house a whirl, often for a family gathering or party activity.

But what about when you want to go pro? How do you stretch your skills to build gingerbread houses worthy of a best-in-show prize?

I’ve made a few of prize winning gingerbread pieces- and received over $7500 for my gingerbread work over the past 5 years. So you’ve come to the right place!

An award-winning gingerbread house takes planning, precision, and masterful presentation. And just like any art form or skill, it takes practice. The more you do it, the better you get, and that’s the truth. So your first step is to be prepared to give it more than one try!

Of course, there’s the basic hacks that every gingerbread-er should know: jolly rancher windows, adding battery lights, baking things ahead of schedule (weeks in advance even).

But let’s talk about the gingerbread secret hacks that only the pros will tell you. The kind that will actually win you awards for your sweet creations 👇🏼

1. Bake with your cut-out windows and doors still in place.

In a competition, the straight edges matter. The cleaner your gingerbread pieces look, the more points you’ll get with judges and the easier time you’ll have decorating and assembling.

It doesn’t take many google searches to realize you need a construction gingerbread recipe to bake sturdy cookies that don’t budge during baking (I personally use Sugar Geek’s here!), but here’s the hack that will really change the game: Don’t pull out the cut out pieces from your rolled out gingerbread. Bake with them in!

Cut the shapes of the windows and doors, but leave those extra gingerbread scraps in place during baking. That will help prevent bulging and keep nice, crisp lines for your windows, doors, and other decorative openings.

Roll out your gingerbread on a silicon mat, cut and trim all the pieces right onto the matt, and then put it all in the oven to bake, removing those inner cut out pieces right after the gingerbread comes out of the oven.

2. Dye your icing brown to hide the seams.

This is probably my favorite hack of all. No gingerbread house will ever be exactly perfect. We’re taking extremely soft and perishable mediums and building a structure out of them. There’s bound to be some slight asymmetries.

But if you dye a portion of your royal icing brown to match the color of your gingerbread, you can hide the seams where your gingerbread pieces meet up, and even cover nicks and holes in the cookies that way!

I also use a small palette knife or icing spatula to smooth out the icing along the edges where the cookies meet for a seamless finish.

Of course, I keep plenty of white royal icing for the actual decorating, but the brown is clutch when assembling your structure.

3. Start with a model.

I wanted to give you some of the juicier tips first, instead of boring you with “building a model!” as number one, but it most definitely is the first step to creating a gingerbread masterpiece worthy of a prize. I use a quarter inch thick foam board to cut and assemble my blueprint days before I ever pre-heat the oven.

This gives you a tangible pulse on the height and width of your structure, provides spatial awareness within the size limits, and then the foam pieces become your stencil template for actually cutting out the cookies. The thicker foam boards mimic a cookie well and help you account for the edges of the cookie and the extra measurement needed to make sure they all connect properly. A flat pattern doesn’t give you the same feel for that. 

4. Draw the judges in with a story.

A good gingerbread house is clean, beautiful, and pleasant to look at.

But an unforgettable gingerbread house brings to life a story.

As I’ve competed over the past almost decade in gingerbread, I’ve seen dozens of absolutely incredible gingerbread artworks, but the houses and structures that I most remember are the ones that told a story through every detail and piece of décor.

My first year competing I took 3rd place and it was amazing! My piece was titled Santa's Stable and featured Santa prepping the reindeer for Christmas night. It was that storytelling that made the piece compelling, and got it featured by Martha Stewart on her Instagram as her third favorite gingerbread creation of the year.

A few years later at a different competition, a fellow competitor that took 3rd place overall had recreated the house from the Christmas movie “Home Alone”, down to the knocked over statue in the front, the broken shelves in Buzz’s room, and a pizza box in the kitchen. I've never forgotten it (and still think it should have placed 1st!)

Home Alone gingerbread house by Becky Caldwell. Image from University Place Mall.

If you know who the judges are going to be, leverage that information and play to the tastes of the judges. Research what their style is and what their baking discipline is so you can keep that in mind as you design and decorate.

Professional judges will know what techniques to look for and will be more attentive to advanced decorating techniques, sculpting, and difficulty level. In the case of professional baker judges, opt for hand-crafted décor elements in place of stencils and molds, because professional judges can tell the difference and will give you more credit for well-made freehanded décor. 

Oftentimes, city sponsored gingerbread competitions are judged by city officers and community members, who will have less preference towards technicality and more interest in just the overall vibe and look. How well can you capture their attention and bring to life a traditional gingerbread piece with your own added flair? 

Play to the interests of whoever your judges are.

5. Build your own edible gingerbread dowels and supports! 

The biggest anxiety of a gingerbread builder is structure: can it hold its own weight? Can it stay standing during the delivery drive?

As I’ve competed, I’ve been astounded at just how sturdy my gingerbread houses have turned out. You could’ve used some of those beauties for a chair and had it hold steady under your weight. My brother and dad finally took my first gingerbread piece to the shooting range to destroy it.

But if you’re worried about structure or working with a complex and delicate design that may have a harder time standing, it will feel frustrating that competition rules restrict you from using wooden dowels or inedible materials to hold up your structure. 

No worries! Just bake your own gingerbread dowels to support the inside! 

For my Santa's Stable gingerbread piece, I baked an extra wall cookie that went inside the middle of the house structure to help hold up the weight of the roof.

I like to make varied sizes of long logs of construction gingerbread dowels at about an inch thick in diameter. I over-bake these support pieces to give them a sturdy, dry texture with no weak soft spots. Then they can be used on the inside of the piece, propped under roof pieces or wedged in the corner to add integrity to the walls. 

If you’ve designed your gingerbread house well with thick royal icing holding it together, most likely you don’t need these structural gingerbread elements. However, when you have to pack up the gingerbread piece, drive it an hour away, and get it out of the car and up a flight of stairs to the competition floor… Those extra supports can at least give you some peace of mind. 

One year I was delivering my gingerbread dinosaur museum to a competition and during the drive one of my roof pieces came loose and skewed.

This was my fault, because I did what all of us bakers do best: I procrastinated. I didn’t start the project when I should have, so the icing holding some of the cookies in place was not all the way dry, and I hadn’t had time to bake extra structural gingerbread cookies which could’ve held my roof up.

Quick thinking had me purchasing a pack of Jr. Mints at the movie theater next door, which I smushed into a paste and used to stick my roof back together. It was by no means a long term solution, but it worked just enough to survive judging and take first place!

6. Use sand paper and graters for smooth, even edges.

Like I’ve said before, when you're working with soft, edible, perishable materials there’s just bound to be imperfections. It’s the nature of the craft. When my gingerbread pieces come out of the oven, the gluten structure of the cookie is still hot and has some fluidity to it. That’s a great time to take a sharp little knife and trim off any edges that are curved or bulged out of place (obviously, don’t touch the pan and be cautious because they’re hot).

But if your pieces are hard and cooled and you run into uneven cuts in your cookies as you're putting the structure together, simply use a hand grater, a piece of sandpaper, or even the edge of your knife to shave off the un-even bits until your cookie pieces fit snuggly together.

My husband helping me use a dremel to sand the edges of my reindeer cookies for my gingerbread carousel.

7. PAY ATTENTION to the RULES

Seems like another dull hack to include, like building the model. Absolutely necessary to be addressed however! The dumbest thing that could possibly happen to you in a gingerbread competition is having your days of hard work disqualified based on a simple infringement of the rules.

READ THE COMPETITION RULES COMPLETELY AND THOROUGHLY.

FOLLOW THEM. ABIDE BY THEM.

DO NOT STRAY FROM THEM!

Creating gingerbread competition pieces and venturing into custom piece commissions, has been a chaotic, exciting, exhausting and rewarding adventure. It’s stretched me as an artist and as a baker. I’ve learned new techniques. I’ve pushed my skills further than before.

And I’ve paid for many Christmas mornings for my kiddos using prize money from winning gingerbread competitions. 

With the blessings of all that is sugary and buttered, I wish you all the luck as you take these hacks to heart and begin your gingerbread competition journey.

And if you make something cool, share it with me on Instagram @the.outofhome.baker and I’ll post it on my page!