While kids and amateurs might dabble with Trader Joe’s kits and gloopy white icing, the world’s best gingerbread house builders operate on another level altogether. Using what’s called “construction grade gingerbread” to craft elaborate structures like gravity-defying Gothic cottages and Indonesian Tongkonans, these savants of both construction and cookery manipulate edible materials with aplomb, spending months constructing and honing their masterpieces in service of some holiday cheer—and often a little competition.

When Heather Brookshire, a baker in Spring, Texas, found her passion for gingerbread houses, she was just a kid watching Good Morning America. That’s where she saw the winners of that year’s National Gingerbread House Competition in Asheville, North Carolina. (The 32nd annual contest was canceled for 2024 in the wake of Hurricane Helene, though its organizers coordinated a slightly different version of the tradition as a stand-in.) In high school, Brookshire started messing around with gingerbread kits for fun, and once she entered culinary school, her hobby only amplified. After she graduated, she started making her own patterns and buying books about how to make bigger, better gingerbread houses. Now, she’s turned it into a career, selling gingerbread houses, cakes, and cookies as a cottage baker in the Houston area.

Brookshire says she’s “lost count of how many” competitions she’s done, though she knows she’s taken a showpiece to the National Gingerbread House Competition twice, where she says she’s competed against “the best of the best.” (The National Competition grand prize winner takes home a $7,500 check, a trophy, and a deluxe weekend stay at Asheville’s Omni Grove Park Inn, where the event is hosted.) She’s also appeared on Food Network multiple times, showing off her skills on Holiday Gingerbread Showdown, Holiday Baking Championship: Gingerbread Showdown, and Christmas Cookie Challenge.

When making a gingerbread house, Brookshire says, her imagination is her only limit. She occasionally leans toward Victorian home design, with its elaborate scrollwork that looks great piped out in icing, but she also loves a good midcentury-modern home. While she still uses old-fashioned gingerbread and royal icing to make a lot of her work, she says she’s dabbling in new techniques as well, using her Eddie edible ink printer to get even greater detail on her pieces and tasking her husband with 3D printing cookie cutters she can use to make precise and repeatable designs. And, if she is ever stumped about how to get a portico to stand for long periods of time or what type of candy most resembles classic bamboo, she need only look online, where gingerbread artists from around the world gather on message boards, Facebook groups, and TikTok to share their tips and tricks. You can buy gingerbread house templates on Etsy and search the web for recipes for easy-to-make hard candy windows and something called “ginger clay,” which is basically crushed up pieces of gingerbread mixed with tree gum to create something technically edible but mostly just sculptable.

Gingerbread-By-Design, first launched in 1999 by Loreta Wilson, was one of the web’s first sources for gingerbread information. With hundreds of what Wilson says are “extremely nice and generous and giving” users signing on to create a community of gingerbread fans and artists, the site blossomed over time, hosting forums, online competitions, and an architecturally diverse cache of templates. Gingerbread builders, Wilson says, run the gamut from professional bakers to stay-at-home moms, many of whom pass their love for the craft down to their kids.

“You can’t just throw together these big pieces in a weekend. You need drying time, and you need internal project management.”

In Wilson’s 25 years tracking big-time gingerbread building, she says she’s seen every trick in the book. While she’s not really sure what makes a cookie gingerbread—does it have to have molasses? Is it just the spices? Does it have to be brown?—she knows you could eat her builder-grade gingerbread if you were hard-pressed, though she doesn’t recommend it. The same goes for everything on you might see on a gingerbread house in the National Competition, where Wilson says she’s seen grape stems dipped in chocolate used as tree trunks and fresh sage and pine needles to create vegetation. “None of it’s going to kill you,” Wilson says. “It’s not eating a nail. You could eat all of it, but there’s a fine line in competition in terms of what’s considered edible. Most of the time, people will just run it by their fellow competitors before a contest to see what they think if they’re not sure.”

Wilson says most national competitors start their entries for the event (typically held in November) in June, building out pieces with scroll saws, drills, and files. At the National Competition, everything above the plywood board base must be edible, and the main structure must be at least 75 percent gingerbread. “You can’t just throw together these big pieces in a weekend,” Wilson says. “You need drying time, and you need internal project management, because you cannot put your walls together, throw a roof on, and start loading it up with candy, because it’s going to crumble.” She adds that these days, a lot of competitors are using sugar syrup to hold their builds together or dyeing some of their royal icing brown to disguise the bits holding walls together. Competitive gingerbread builders are masters of weather, using dehumidifiers to keep their pieces dry and solid, and bringing carry kits full of replacement pieces, icing, and other little fixes with them to contests, just in case.

That’s not to say there aren’t occasional oversights. Wilson says she once built a gingerbread house before realizing the 36-inch-wide base she’d used wouldn’t fit through the 32-inch-wide front door of her home, making for some tense tilting. Brookshire says she’s had well-set pieces break just because she turned her car into a parking space while transporting them. It’s a tense hobby, and one that requires patience.

It also requires a good sense of design. Wilson says she first got into gingerbread building because she liked drawing houses and floor plans, and a number of prominent regional and global architectural organizations, even firms, hold annual gingerbread competitions and showcases to raise money or drive member engagement. The American Institute of Architects’s Baltimore, Houston, and Boston chapters, for example, all hold contests, and the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design (ArkDes) organizes an annual gingerbread house exhibition, as does London’s Museum of Architecture. The latter’s annual Gingerbread City exhibit has even drawn contributions from major firms like Zaha Hadid Architects. While the standards for those contests are generally less rigorous than those at the National Competition, they can still yield impressive results.

Rusty Bienvenue, executive director of AIA Houston, says that his group’s Gingerbread Build-Off has grown steadily over its 15-year existence, moving from a small art space to City Hall to a large neighborhood park. This year, more than 30 teams—mostly architects, but some bakers, school groups, and locals—will compete for bragging rights and a trophy that looks like a plastic gingerbread man. Anywhere between 3,000 and 5,000 people will attend to check out the builds, and hundreds of kids will try their hand at building their own extremely sticky, mostly messy houses out of graham crackers and icing. (“My biggest problem with this event,” Bienvenue jokes, “is that people want to shake my hand.”)

“It’s amazing what these folks do,” Bienvenue says, adding that his group does the event not just to spread holiday joy but also to boost “public engagement and allow space to talk about the other things that Architecture Center Houston does, like scholarship programs that people might not otherwise know about.”

Sometimes the regional events are also about funding those programs, like the Boston Society for Architecture’s Gingerbread Design Competition & Exhibition, which raises money to support the group’s foundation. With participants tasked with completing a design based on a theme (this year’s is “Boston Neighborhoods: Holiday In The Hub”), the competition gathers entries reflecting the diversity of the city’s architecture, from colonial homes to modern transit systems.

Anne McKinnon, senior planner at Massachusetts firm Leonardi Aray Architects, worked with her team to submit a gingerbread version of the Ames-Webster Gilded Age mansion in the city’s Back Bay neighborhood. She says that she’s found even the most savvy architects have struggled to understand the difficulties of working to scale in gingerbread: “If you’re an architect or somebody in the field, you want to show that attention to detail is part of your tools, so you want to get the details right. That being said, sometimes you can’t make 7,000 windows, so you fudge a little bit.”

“Our house this year was supposed to have four chimneys and I think I was lucky if I did one,” McKinnon adds. “It also has 40 dormers, and there’s not enough time in the world to make all those.”

Ultimately, constructing a gingerbread house—or mansion or train station—is just about having fun and celebrating the holiday season, no matter how long it takes. “Deep down, I think people associate gingerbread with decorating cookies as kids,” says Wilson. “Making a gingerbread house is still very much a family craft, a holiday craft, and it’s always a special time.”

Top photo courtesy Architecture Center Houston

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