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Gluten Free Gingerbread House (Vegan)

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Celebrate Christmas with a fun homemade gluten free gingerbread house! The dough does not require chilling before baking, so this recipe is faster than traditional gingerbread dough. Our gingerbread house recipe is also vegan and nut free, and it comes with a printable template for cutting out your house pieces.

photo collage of gluten free gingerbread house and text

There’s nothing quite like making a gingerbread house during the holidays! We don’t make one every year, but if you have the time, it’s a fun way to celebrate Christmas with kids.

We used our gluten free and vegan gingerbread cookie recipe, doubled it, and created our own pattern to make this allergy friendly gingerbread house! It’s gluten free, vegan, and nut free so this fits many allergies.

You can decorate this with different kinds of candies if you want, but we just decorated ours with our dairy free buttercream frosting, which works great for putting together the house pieces and decorating the outside (even without eggs).

photo of allergy friendly gingerbread house on a white board

Our gingerbread house is:

  • Gluten free
  • Dairy Free
  • Vegan and egg free
  • Peanut free
  • Tree nut free (depending on the dairy free butter you use)
  • Soy free (depending on the dairy free butter you use)

How to make a gluten free and vegan gingerbread house

Here are the instructions and steps for making our gluten free and dairy free gingerbread house. The full recipe card is at the end of the post, this is just an overview of the steps.

  1. Print the gingerbread house template (linked below) and cut out the pieces. Set aside.
  2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
  3. In a medium bowl, beat together the dairy free butter, brown sugar, molasses, and vanilla.
  4. In a separate small bowl, whisk together the flours, spices, and salt.
  5. Add half the flour mixture to the butter mixture and blend together.
  6. Add the rest of the flour mix to the bowl with the oat/rice milk and beat together until a thick dough forms that sticks together when pressed together. Mixing the flour in parts makes it much easier to mix the dough.
  7. If the dough seems a little dry and doesn’t come together, add more milk 1 teaspoon at a time, mixing and testing how cohesive it is after each addition, until a thick dough forms. It needs to be thick and able to rolled out (so not too soft or moist).
  8. If the dough seems a little too moist to roll, add an additional 1-2 Tablespoons gluten free baking mix flour and chill the dough for 1-2 hours to help it firm up a bit before rolling.
  9. Divide dough into 2 balls, flatten slightly into disks. While rolling one disc of dough, wrap the other one with plastic wrap to keep it from drying out.
  10. Flour a pastry mat with some of the gluten free flour and roll out one of the cookie dough disks 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick (trying to get an even thickness) and cut out the dough using the template pieces.
  11. Use a lightly floured spatula to lift the cut out cookies onto the baking sheet. Reshape if needed if the dough pieces deformed a little bit while moving them.
  12. Cut all the pieces you need for your gingerbread house. Any extra dough can be pressed together and recut for regular cookies.
  13. Bake the house pieces for 12 minutes.
  14. Allow the cookies to cool about 10-15 minutes on the pan. Add starlight mints to the windows of the house pieces (1-2 mints in each window) and bake again for 8 minutes to melt and spread the mint candies to fill the windows.
  15. Cool completely.
  16. Assemble and decorate with our allergy friendly frosting. You can add a little bit more powdered sugar to the recipe for a firmer hold. One batch of frosting assembles and decorates this house with some extra frosting left over.
photo collage showing steps to make gluten free gingerbread house

We used gluten free baking mix (vs. gluten free all purpose flour) that has baking soda, salt, and xanthan gum in the mix already. 

Because this recipe doesn’t use eggs, you need to use a gluten free baking mix or flour that has xanthan gum in it since it acts as a binder in this recipe instead of eggs.

Tips for making our gluten free gingerbread house

If you need to square up the edges of the house pieces, use a microplane to “file” off any rounded edges that might prevent the house from sitting flat level. Just watch your fingers since they can be really sharp (speaking from experience!).

photo of microplane and grater used to level edges of gingerbread house pieces

Assemble your gingerbread house on a cardboard cake board or the back of a sheet pan covered with foil for easier clean up.

We used a cake board that had a white surface on one side that made it easy to create a winter scene. I added some shredded coconut around the house and bottle brush trees to make it look snowy!

If you don’t have frosting bags, you can use ziploc bags and just snip off the corner of the bag and use it for your piping tips (that’s what we usually do!). That way you can just toss the bag once you’re done using it, and you can use several different bags for different tips or frosting colors.

pieces of gingerbread house on a black cooling rack with peppermint candy in the windows
The roof pieces in my first house were too small, but we fixed that in our template!

Instructions for our gingerbread house pattern

You can download our gingerbread house pattern which makes 1 gingerbread house out of this batch of dough. You might have a little extra dough you can cut into gingerbread men to go with the house if you want.

The pattern is in a 2-page PDF format meant to be printed out on an 8.5×11-inch piece of paper (standard letter sized paper) to make a gingerbread house that’s about 7-1/2 inches tall, 5-1/2 inches wide, and about 5-1/2 inches deep.

Download or print the gingerbread template PDF below

To print a full-sized template, make sure to print at 100% or at “actual size” on your printer settings to fill a standard size piece of paper.

If you’d like to make a smaller gingerbread house, you can do that by printing at a smaller % (like 80% for a house that’s 80% of the size of mine).

But just be aware that the outside edges of the template are drawn against the edge of the paper, if you shrink the pattern you won’t have all of the outer edges of the template and may have to draw some of them in yourself.

front view of gluten free gingerbread house next to bottle brush trees

What kind of dairy free butter should I use?

Just like with our regular gingerbread cookies, I recommend using a dairy free butter that is more firm at room temperature, such as Country Crock Plant Butter (which is what we used), or something like the Flora plant butter.

I don’t recommend using the Earth Balance butter in this recipe since it tends to be too soft at room temperature and unless the recipe calls for it specifically, the cookies often spread too much when people use it.

Just as a note, the Country Crock plant butter sticks do not use soybean oil but the tubs do have soybean oil. So if you have soy allergies get the sticks not the tubs.

photo of decorated gingerbread house with text overlay

Our old gingerbread house

I had originally posted about gingerbread houses back in December of 2011 just a couple months after I started The Fit Cookie. One of our local bakeries was doing a gingerbread house contest so I jumped on board and created a gingerbread house scene complete with a rock path and a candy pond with Swedish fish.

The photos aren’t great, but here are some of my old photos for some gingerbread house inspiration. The licorice Rips make great shingles for a roof and the pond is still one of my favorites. It’s made with blue gel frosting, but you can also make one with melted blue Jolly Rancher candies similar to how we made windows for our new house with starlight mints.

photo collage of older gingerbread scene from 2011 that is decorated with candy
We left half the roof undone so people could see what it looks like

Our old one also had a door and shutters, which you can add to your house if you want to, you’ll just need to measure them out and cut them from the extra cookie dough.

For the candy stained glass windows in our old gingerbread house, we used the same method of melting candy into the windows except we used Jolly Ranchers instead of starlight mints.

Gluten Free Gingerbread House (Vegan)

Celebrate Christmas with a fun homemade gluten free gingerbread house! The dough does not require chilling before baking, so this recipe is faster than traditional gingerbread dough. Our gingerbread house recipe is also vegan and nut free, and it comes with a printable template for cutting out your house pieces.
Makes about 1 gingerbread house about 7-1/2 inches tall, 5-1/2 inches wide, and about 5-1/2 inches deep.
Gluten free, vegan; Free of: eggs, dairy, soy, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts
5 from 2 votes
Print Pin Rate
Course: Cookies, Desserts
Cuisine: English
Keyword: gluten free gingerbread house, vegan gingerbread house
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Cook Time: 12 minutes
Cooling time: 15 minutes
Total Time: 47 minutes
Servings: 1 house
Calories: 2935kcal

Ingredients

Instructions

  • Print the gingerbread house template and cut out the pieces. Set aside.
  • Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
  • In a medium bowl, beat together the dairy free butter, brown sugar, molasses, and vanilla.
  • In a separate small bowl, whisk together the flours, spices, and salt.
  • Add half the flour mixture to the butter mixture and blend together.
  • Add the rest of the flour mix to the bowl with the oat/rice milk and beat together until a thick dough forms that sticks together when pressed together. Mixing the flour in parts makes it much easier to mix the dough.
  • If the dough seems a little dry and doesn't come together, add more milk 1 teaspoon at a time, mixing and testing how cohesive it is after each addition, until a thick dough forms. It needs to be thick and able to rolled out (so not too soft or moist).
  • If the dough seems a little too moist to roll, add an additional 1-2 Tablespoons gluten free baking mix flour and chill the dough for 1-2 hours to help it firm up a bit before rolling.
  • Divide dough into 2 balls, flatten slightly into disks. While rolling one disc of dough, wrap the other one with plastic wrap to keep it from drying out.
  • Flour a pastry mat with some of the gluten free flour and roll out one of the cookie dough disks 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick (trying to get an even thickness) and cut out the dough using the template pieces.
  • Use a lightly floured spatula to lift the cut out cookies onto the baking sheet. Reshape if needed if the dough pieces deformed a little bit while moving them.
  • Cut all the pieces you need for your gingerbread house. Any extra dough can be pressed together and recut for regular cookies.
  • Bake the house pieces for 12 minutes.
  • Allow the cookies to cool about 10-15 minutes on the pan. Add starlight mints to the windows of the house pieces (1-2 mints in each window) and bake again for 8 minutes to melt and spread the mint candies to fill the windows.
  • Cool completely.
  • If you need to square up the edges of the house pieces, use a microplane to "sand" of any rounded edges that might prevent the house from sitting flat.
  • Assemble and decorate with our allergy friendly frosting. You can add a little bit more powdered sugar to the recipe for a firmer hold. One batch of frosting assembles and decorates this house with some extra frosting left over.

Video

Notes

*We used gluten free baking mix (vs. gluten free all purpose flour) that has baking soda, salt, and xanthan gum in the mix already. 

Nutrition

Serving: 1unfrosted house cookie | Calories: 2935kcal | Carbohydrates: 444g | Protein: 19g | Fat: 125g | Saturated Fat: 54g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 12g | Monounsaturated Fat: 49g | Trans Fat: 1g | Cholesterol: 1mg | Sodium: 2447mg | Potassium: 1644mg | Fiber: 26g | Sugar: 284g | Vitamin A: 77IU | Vitamin C: 1mg | Calcium: 531mg | Iron: 12mg
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2 thoughts on “Gluten Free Gingerbread House (Vegan)”

  1. 5 stars
    Why didn’t I see this recipe before this years’ Christmas? oh well, I will definitely try this on the next holiday season!!

    Reply

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