Do people make gingerbread houses in January? Maybe you won’t be considering this simple custom gingerbread house idea until next holiday season. It seems like a good enough snow day activity, if you ask me.

This past holiday season I had a surge in web traffic from that one time I made a DIY sugar cookie (gingerbread alternative) replica of my house. My old house, that is. The façade of our home is more complicated and I didn’t have any grand plans of making a replica of it this year. But when I showed the cool pictures of the sugar cookie house to my kindergartner, he wanted to make something special.

I don’t like gingerbread kits.

• They taste gross
• No one wants to eat them
• Kids want to keep them, sugary ant bait, on the counter for a log time so they can admire their work of art
• Unnecessary plastic packaging is an environmental nuisance
• The cost is just silly for stale cookie, icing that doesn’t hold the thing together, and rock hard candy

We knew we wanted to make something from scratch, but didn’t want the tedious task of having to create a model ahead of time, like I did with that replica endeavor.

We had a different idea.

DIY Custom Gingerbread House Using Magnatiles

Magnatiles are made out of food-grade plastic, and they allow you to plan out shapes in a fuss-free way.

1. Build your intended shape with the magnetic tiles

We decided we’d keep our experiment really simple & have several little village homes rather than one complicated one. That called for four squares for walls, two squares for the roof, and two equilateral triangles for the front of the roofs.

2. Wash and dry the tiles well using dish soap in the kitchen sink

Sometimes the magnetic tiles may catch water inside, make sure they’re empty of water and dry. You don’t want a surprise spill of water on your dough.

3. Lay magnetic tiles on cookie dough

4. Use a butter knife to slice the dough around the Magnatiles, using their edges as a guide

5. Chill & bake!

When dealing with cut sugar cookies, I always pop ‘em in the freezer for about seven minutes before putting them in the oven. They bake more evenly that way and they maintain their shape better.

6. Cool & assemble

After your sugar cookies have cooled, you’ll need something to make them stick together-actually stick together, unlike that junk in those kits. You’ll need two ingredients: sugar and water.

If you want to complicate it a little more, you can check Martha Stewart’s sugar and water recipe. You do you! As the sugar water has cooled, it will become more sticky and easier to brush on with a silicone brush, but I preferred to dunk the sides of the cookie. I’d prop it up and let it fully cool.

If your cookies don’t line up properly, don’t fret. You can use those Magnatiles as a guide to cut them after baking, too. I think I had to do that with the first batch that I forgot to freeze.

7. Decorate away!

Christmas is that wonderful time of year when you still have Halloween candy around but it’s not the pick of the litter stuff, so you can throw it on top of a sugar cookie. The man of the house whipped up some icing and I dyed it a couple of colors and used that to apply the Halloween candy. I also had some modeling chocolate from my son’s birthday cake.