We taste-tested seven gingerbread house kits you’re likely to find at your local supermarket or online. To find the very best ones, we built all seven houses—then sampled each without knowing which was which. Our winner is the Cookies United Gingerbread Kit, but we also crowned two worthy runners-up.
Building gingerbread houses is a classic holiday tradition. There are no real rules to it…just that it stays standing. You can intricately decorate the roof with frosting icicles, adorn the apex with gumdrops, and create your own gingerbread family to live inside. Everyone can take part—no age limit or architecture degree required. While building and decorating gingerbread houses is a beloved pastime for many, the houses aren’t exactly known for being delicious. Some may taste great but won’t last an hour on your counter, while others have the flavor of cardboard but hold up for the entire month of December.
To find the best gingerbread kits that both taste good and stay standing, I built houses from seven widely available brands, then had our editors sample each in random order, without knowing which was which. We assessed each for flavor, texture, and sturdiness, and after tallying the scores, we crowned an overall winner, as well as one worthy runner-up.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
The Criteria
A good gingerbread house kit should be thoughtfully designed. The pieces should fit seamlessly together, and the icing should act as glue to hold everything together. An ideal gingerbread house should be easy to build and structurally sound. In short, the ingredients provided should get the job done without hassle. The kits should also include enough icing and candy to decorate the house thoroughly. If you run out of icing after assembling the structure and don’t have any left for decoration, you’re missing out on half of the fun—plus, your house won’t be as pretty.
Gingerbread houses are meant to be built and decorated, so that’s exactly what I did. During the hours I spent assembling the seven gingerbread houses, I noted the texture and holding strength of the icing, as well as how easily each structure stood and supported itself.
Ideally, they should also taste good, with warm notes of holiday spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and, of course, ginger. With that in mind, we also evaluated each house based on the flavor and texture of the gingerbread itself.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Overall Winner
Cookies United Gingerbread House Kit
Our overall winner scored well in every category. It actually tasted like gingerbread—with notes of cinnamon, ginger, and molasses—and our editors found it remarkably edible. The icing wasn’t too sweet and was soft and easy to spread. And the house came together quickly.
Our associate culinary editor, Laila, thought that the gingerbread’s ginger flavor came through clearly. Our associate visuals director, Amanda, agreed, saying, “This is the only one I think I could eat a whole cookie of.” Our editorial director, Daniel, also approved of the flavor. “This is the only one I think you can consider not just technically edible but at least in the vicinity of tasty,” he wrote in his tasting notes.
The kit comes with a moat-like tray foundation to build the house on, which helped keep it standing. The gingerbread has etched details, such as roof shingles, which made for a nice presentation. The kit includes three types of candy: gumdrops, small sugar balls, and a confetti mix of mini gingerbread people and holly. While it doesn’t have as many candies as some other kits, it offers enough variety to get creative with decorating.
The gingerbread house is smaller than the others we sampled, but that might be a good thing if you’re building one for the first time or want a kit that feels manageable.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Runners-Up
Overall Runner-Up: Williams Sonoma DIY Gingerbread House Kit
At $40, this is the most expensive kit we tested. At first, the product seemed to justify the cost: Its packaging is shaped like a gingerbread house, complete with an easy-to-hold handle on top. When the box was opened, the gingerbread pieces, while large and clunky, had a noticeably warm, spicy scent. Amanda liked the cookie’s ginger notes and sweetness, and Daniel even begrudgingly admitted that the gingerbread was edible—even if it wasn’t entirely pleasant to eat.
The kit doesn’t come with much icing or candy, but the icing comes pre-made and pre-bagged, which streamlined the building process. However, its texture was tacky—almost like Play-Doh—making it difficult to pipe smoothly along the gingerbread. I ultimately had to use my fingers to smudge the icing along the edges of the pieces so they would stick together. While it successfully held the gingerbread pieces together, it was so thick and unwieldy that any intricate decoration was out of the question.
Overall, this house was the most substantial of the lot and the only one that could pass as homemade. It had a lovely smell of ginger, cloves, and allspice. If you’re looking for a large house you wouldn’t mind eating, this is a great choice. But if you’re most excited about decorating, we recommend the kit below.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
The Best Gingerbread Kit for Decorating: One Candy Way Easy to Assemble and Ready to Decorate Gingerbread House Kit
The gingerbread in this kit comes pre-decorated with etched details of a wreath, shingles, windows, doors, and even a rock foundation. The cookie pieces function like a three-dimensional coloring book, offering a clear and easy-to-follow guide for where to put icing and candies.
This kit includes traditional (and, in our opinion, essential) gumdrops, along with mini candies shaped like holly, lights, stars, candy canes, and gingerbread people, expanding the decorating possibilities. You can hang holly above the door and arrange lights across the windows and roof.
Of all the icings in the kits we sampled, this one was the easiest to use. It comes in an easy-to-squeeze bag with a twist-off cap—no mixing, warming, or transferring to a piping bag required. Unlike some icings in other kits, which were often loose and failed to hold gingerbread pieces together, this one worked like glue. It’s strong, too: Thanks to the icing, the house remained structurally sound for hours. Even after knocking on it and picking it up in our hands, it held its shape.
While this gingerbread house was delightful to build, it wasn’t pleasurable to eat. Laila described it as “stale and bitter, with none of the warmth expected from gingerbread,” and thought its flavor was flat and cardboard-like. Though Amanda didn’t mind its flavor, she found it slightly too artificial for her liking. For that reason, we recommend it for building and decorating only.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
The Contenders
- Create a Treat E-Z- Build Gingerbread House
- Cookies United Gingerbread House Kit
- Favorite Day Classic House Gingerbread Kit
- One Candy Way Easy to Assemble and Ready to Decorate Gingerbread House Kit
- Trader Joe’s Gingerbread House Kit
- Williams Sonoma DIY Gingerbread House Kit
- Wilton Build-It-Yourself Gingerbread House Kit, Petite
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Key Takeaways and Conclusion
Gingerbread houses aren’t exactly known for being delicious. Daniel said it best: “If I were Hansel with my sister Gretel, I wouldn’t eat any of these.” There are a few reasons for that. Gingerbread pieces are designed to be thick and hard, so they won’t crumble when standing. The dough is typically stiff, made with minimal fat and leaveners, and baked for a long time to ensure it’s sturdy enough to support the icing and decorations.
On top of that, the kits aren’t designed for freshness and flavor. They’re mass-produced, and every component, including the cookies, candy, and icing, relies on stabilizers, thickeners, and preservatives. While these additives help maintain structural integrity and prevent spoilage, they can make the cookies taste like cardboard, and the icing and candies taste starchy, chalky, and waxy. In our testing, real gingerbread flavor was the rarest feature of pre-cooked, some-assembly-required gingerbread house kits.
Of all the gingerbread houses we tasted, only two—our winner and our runner-up—specify the exact spices used in their cookies. Our winner, Cookies United, is also the only brand that uses milk in its cookies, which provides moisture and fat, and may explain why our editors found it the only truly edible option.
We found even the most expensive gingerbread house kit, at $40 (hi, Williams Sonoma!), tasted a bit stale. We had to rank flavor with a grain of salt: We wouldn’t sneak a piece of any of these gingerbread houses in the middle of the night, but some were definitely more edible than others.
If you’re buying a pre-baked gingerbread house kit primarily for eating, you’ll likely end up disappointed and are better off making your own gingerbread from scratch. Ultimately, gingerbread house kits should be used exactly for their intended purpose: building and decorating.
While our winner wasn’t our dream gingerbread house (that one might have to be homemade), it had high marks in all categories, including flavor and candy variety—which is why we recommend it for an all-around positive experience.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Our Testing Methodology
All taste tests are conducted with brands completely hidden and without discussion. Tasters taste samples in random order. For example, taster A may taste sample one first, while taster B will taste sample six first. This is to prevent palate fatigue from unfairly giving any one sample an advantage. Tasters are asked to fill out tasting sheets, ranking the samples according to various criteria. All data is tabulated, and results are calculated with no editorial input to provide the most impartial representation of actual results possible.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
