Gingerbread Village 2024

Every December we create a gingerbread village. We do a ton of brainstorming and come up with a theme that really inspires us. Some years it is more elaborate with completely home made buildings and some years it is less elaborate with all store bought buildings. Throughout the year we keep an eye out for other seasonal cookie kits and decorations for our village. 

This year we found a cinema gingerbread house at World Market and that inspired us to create a small downtown area.  We wanted to make a small Christmas market, a tree farm, a cinema, a vehicle and some sort of large building like a town hall or a home. We were able to find all of the buildings we needed in our gingerbread back stock and in new pre-baked kits. Important reminder that we don’t eat our gingerbread village! So there might occasionally be old kits and candies pulled out. We also assemble the main structures using hot glue.

For our Christmas market we used this kit from Target and this kit from World Market. This section of the village was all done by my mom. She created the most scrumptious looking treats for the Christmas market vendors using life savers and jelly candies. To create the fountain that is in the Christmas market park she used water and sugar to create cast sugar (also called molded sugar). She learned about cast sugar from this video. The woman at the stand and the dog are both sugar sculptures that came with previous years gingerbread kits from Target. The snowmen are Lindt chocolates.

The main house is a kit we had from a previous year from Target. It’s called the Favorite Day Holiday Mansion. We weren’t sure if we wanted this to be someone’s house or a city building. I guess it could be interpreted either way! Both my mom and I worked on this one since it was a bit of a behemoth and neither of us were terribly inspired by it. For the door I used a sheet of gelatin over meringue frosting and then piped over it in black. We always get our gelatin sheets on amazon. The snow on the shingles is meringue frosting spread very thinly. Thin black licorice whips would have made great windows, but we didn’t have that in our supplies. Note for next year!

The cinema is a kit from World Market. This was one I decorated and I loved how it turned out!! It originally came with a really cute sign that would have protruded from the front, but it was designed to only look nice and say cinema from one side. Which I didn’t love. So I wrote out the letters on the marquee and then my mom piped them for me. She’s much more skilled at piping than I am! It also came with some movie posters but they were all fictional and kind of garish, so I made my own posters from the 1994 gem “The Santa Clause”. 

The truck is a kit from Target. Another of my creations. I covered the entire truck in red fondant and then came back and added some black and white fondant details. Walmart has these small bags of fondant that are great for this type of project. I also added a license plate that reads “I heart XMAS”. When we added the icing road at the end we made sure to include a little snow berm so that you can see where the road runs.

The tree stand, decorated by my mom, was actually a chicken coop from an Easter cookie decorating set that we bought last year at Target. The color of the cookie was much lighter since it is a sugar cookie. I created a brown colored icing by mixing some of the store bought colors and then added water to it to create a brown wash. This was then painted over the entire structure to give it a wood look. The sign was made by placing a piece of fondant over a piece of gingerbread. The writing was done using a food safe pen.

When we decorate gingerbread we do each building on its own board. Then when we are finished we place them all on parchment paper on the buffet and cover the parchment and the boards with meringue icing so that it looks like snow. Some years we’ve done each house on a larger board and decorated each board with a front yard. This is a good way to avoid having to spread icing all over the parchment covered table.

We are on the lookout for candies and decorations all year long so that on decorating day we have a table full of options. We also buy a few things that aren’t edible like cotton balls, mini wreaths and garlands. Most of the trees are from Walmart. We got a nice big box of trees this year (these are no longer available to link ): ) The fence posts, lights, benches and clocks are also from a Walmart kit.

We make some meringue icing ourselves and then color portions of it green and red. Homemade is usually a little easier to work with than the ones that come with the kits. We use Wilton meringue powder and this is the Wilton recipe we use. We use cake piping bags and tips to get a good variety of shapes. We also set up a fondant station with lots of different tools and colors. We usually end up using a ruler, pizza cutter, knife, impression sheets, and two different size rolling pins.

For more tips and tricks on how to build your gingerbread houses check out this post. Thanks for checking out this years gingerbread! More to come next year!