Gingerbread house party supplies list
Tell the page how many guests are coming and whether you bake dough or use graham crackers. It turns that into houses, then into batches, baking sheets, boxes, icing and candy. The defaults are a party of 12 with one classic house each: 12 houses.
- Dough batches
- 10
- Food Network Kitchen recipe; 12 of the King Arthur one
- Baking sheet loads
- 24
- 2 per house on an 18 × 13 in pan
- Raw dough
- 15.6 kg
- with 25% for trimmings
- Royal icing
- 15.00 cups
- about 3.9 kg powdered sugar
- Candy
- 7.0 lb
- my estimate, 250 g per house
From guests to houses
Hosts disagree about how many people one house needs, so the form lets you pick. The Speckled Palate says 6 to 12 guests is ideal and that with 8 people or fewer everyone can build their own house. Above that, pairs or small teams keep the table from filling up. A Chinet party guide goes the other way for a village party and suggests supplies for one house plus one other creation per guest.
An odd headcount rounds up, so 13 guests in pairs need 7 houses. The table below keeps one guest per house and shows how the list grows.
| Guests | Dough batches | Sheet loads | Icing | Candy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 5 | 12 | 7.50 cups | 3.5 lb |
| 12 | 10 | 24 | 15.00 cups | 7.0 lb |
| 20 | 16 | 40 | 25.00 cups | 11.5 lb |
| 30 | 24 | 60 | 37.50 cups | 17.0 lb |
Dough or graham crackers
Graham crackers need no oven time and no rolling, which suits a class. Baked dough gives a sturdier house and a more traditional look, but someone has to make and bake it, ideally a day or two before. For your 12 guests the two materials compare like this.
| House | Dough batches | Sheet loads | Dough icing | Graham boxes | Graham icing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small 5 × 6 × 4 in | 7 | 24 | 15.00 cups | 2 | 6.00 cups |
| Classic 6 × 8 × 4 in | 10 | 24 | 15.00 cups | 3 | 9.00 cups |
Dough batches are whole batches of the Food Network Kitchen recipe, rounded up from the total for all houses. Graham counts use a 5 × 2.5 in sheet, 20% spare and 27 sheets per box.
How the numbers are made
Each figure is the per-house number from the guides on this site, multiplied by the houses. The dough comes from the piece areas of a 6 × 8 × 4 in house at 1/4 in thickness, plus 25% for trimmings, as in the dough guide. One house is 1299 g of raw dough. The sheet loads count how many times an 18 × 13 in pan goes in the oven, assuming one pan at a time. With an oven that takes two pans, halve the rounds.
Icing is the "mix" amount from the royal icing guide: 1.25 cups per dough house, 0.75 cups per graham house, rounded up to a quarter cup for the whole group. That covers gluing the walls and roof. Decorating takes more. The Speckled Palate warns you will need more frosting than you think, so set a second bowl of stiff icing at each table, or plan on extra for any house that gets heavy decoration.
The graham counts come from the layouts on the graham cracker house page. A classic house maps to the long cottage, which takes 5 sheets. That page also lets you enter your own sheet size and box count.
Candy is my estimate
I looked for a published weight of candy per house and found none. The party guides I opened give no amounts, only advice to buy extra candy. So the candy line is my own allowance: 150 g per small house and 250 g per classic house, rounded up to the next half pound. That is a mix of gumdrops, candy canes, sprinkles and a few chocolates. A group that decorates every wall and roof panel will use more, and a group that snacks while it works will use a lot more.
If guests bring candy to share, buy half of this and let the table swap. Small bowls keep each kind separate.
The rest of the shopping list
- A board, tray or sturdy plate for each house, so it can be carried to the car.
- Piping bags or zip bags, one per guest, plus ties or clips.
- Small bowls for candy, and spoons for the icing.
- A tablecloth or sheets of parchment, because sugar travels.
- For dough houses: the baked pieces, ready a day ahead. The assembly guide covers the order of gluing.
The Speckled Palate puts the party itself at 3 to 4 hours and suggests assembling houses 1 to 2 days ahead. If you bake from scratch, the dimensions guide has the piece sizes for each house, and the generator prints the classic template at actual size, with the paper pieces ready to trace.