Gingerbread Castles
Here is a completely edible twist on the classic gingerbread house. After many bouts of tears over heavily decorated rooftops that have collapsed, our little family started to make gingerbread castles. I made a template that is free to download below. The castle is a very basic and simple design. Feel free to add brick marks with a butter knife before baking to fancy them up.
This template is best printed out onto white cardstock, cut, and used as a guide to cut out the shapes from your rolled dough.
We used this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. I like it as there isn’t an extra step of having to cook everything on the stovetop. You can just dump everything into your stand mixer. One recipe will make two castles (rolled 1/4 inch thick).
If you have never tried making a homemade gingerbread castle or house before, I highly encourage you to try as they taste way better than any boxed set and will fill your house with the most amazing smell. It does take a bit of planning as the dough needs to be chilled for two hours, each batch of castle pieces take about 20 minutes to bake at a time, and the castles should be put together and have time to set before kids decorate (preferably the night before but we were actually okay one hour before). I also use Sally’s royal icing recipe to put the castles together. I doubled her recipe to make enough to put eight castles together and have leftover for the kids to use to decorate with too.
There are no rules when it comes to decorating. I like to give my kids muffin tins filled with assorted sprinkles, candy, and cereal. Marshmallows, pretzels, and chocolate chips are also delicious to snack on while decorating and make for some really creative castles.
Here, my daughter made a campfire so her gingerbread man can roast marshmallows.
I recommend making at least one extra batch of dough so kids can make and decorate gingerbread men too. After all the castle needs to have its inhabitants and guards.
Adding supplies like sugar cones and m&ms make for fun Christmas trees! I like to make a batch of buttercream frosting for kids to use to decorate those. I like this recipe from Two Sisters. It is so good you can just eat it by itself. I just portion it out in little cups and give kids plastic knives to spread on. I find my kids have an easier time spreading on their frosting as opposed to piping it on.
Jelly beans are great for kids to make wreaths and Christmas lights for their castles.
Leftover Halloween candy (if you still have it) is always good to use.
You could also save this template to make haunted gingerbread castles around Halloween.
The only rule we have (which my husband always breaks) is you can only snack on YOUR castle.
Lastly, as my kids were not quite ready to take down our large sewer scene from brother’s birthday, we made a giant cardboard gingerbread castle. I made some printable templates in case anyone would be interested in recreating it. My kids really love it and it has become the center of their playroom. There are six windows, enough for each member of our family to poke their head through.
It took twenty moving boxes of various sizes. The kids used a mix of large paint brushes and rollers to paint it all nutmeg brown. You could also just leave the cardboard boxes unpainted but we wanted to cover up all our box labels. My daughter helped me to use white chalk to outline all the windows like you would add icing around your windows on a gingerbread house or castle.
We then added on large scale decorations. We used green paper plates, cut out a circle in the center and glued red pom poms to create simple wreaths. My kids used a large plastic lid, traced, and cut circles and colored them to look like small peppermints. I also made a template to make large gumdrops.
This file is best printed out onto white cardstock and used as a template to cut out many gumdrops out of different colored construction paper. Alternatively, you can just give multiple copies to kids to color or paint.
I also made a template to make really large peppermints.
We printed them out onto white cardstock and my kids used acrylic paint then cut them out. We just used masking tape to hang everything up onto our giant cardboard castle.
Your child may also be interested in:
Gingerbread House Craft and Pretend Gingerbread Cookies
Reindeer Paper Bag Puppet Craft and Christmas Elf Paper Puppets
Personalized Christmas Coloring Pages
I create more printable activities for kids here with the goal of helping to grow kids who love to learn.
If you make these castles in your home or classroom, I would love to see it! Please use #sodangfun on social media, tag me @sodangfun on Instagram, or post to my Facebook page.
Hope this post can be helpful and fun for your family this holiday season!
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