The farmhouse look is three things: white walls striped with vertical battens, black window frames, and a front porch that runs the full width of the house. Two of those are icing. The third is structure, which is why a farmhouse needs its own template rather than a box with a porch drawn on.
This is the farmhouse spoke of our free printable gingerbread house templates, where the printing, scaling and re-cutting rules live. Everything here is about one shape: what is on the sheet, the order the eleven pieces go together, the two porch joints that give way, and how to get the look in icing.
If you have built the classic six-piece house, the porch is the only new work. If this is your first house, build it over two days and let the clock below set your times. And if you wanted a farmhouse from a kit that came as a plain box, the finish section works on a kit too. Print the sheet, measure the bar, and start with the pieces.
Farmhouse Gingerbread House Template
Makes 1 farmhouse, 11 baked pieces · Intermediate · Finished 2.98 by 3.22 by 3.06 inches with the porch
Total time about 7 hours, most of it curing. Calculated from the cure times on our icing page, not measured from a build.
Print this one: US Letter PDF or A4 PDF. 11 pieces, finished house 2.98 by 3.22 by 3.06 inches, porch included. Every sheet carries a 1 inch bar so you can check the scale before you make dough.
Tools: printer, ruler, scissors or a craft knife, a rolling pin with quarter inch guides, half sheet pans, parchment, a piping bag with a small round tip, and a board or plate at least 6 by 6 inches.
Materials
Steps
Notes: the geometry is computed, not drawn by eye: the roof panels are cut to the true gable slope and the porch roof to the true porch slope, so both reach. Nobody has baked from this sheet yet. If yours is the first, the comments are open.
Eleven pieces, all on one page, at one shared scale so the Letter and A4 sheets make the same house. The first six are the ordinary gable box, drawn taller than our classic template so the house reads as a storey and a half. The last five are the porch.
| Piece | Cut | Size on the sheet | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Side wall | 2 | 2.98 by 2.23 in | The long walls. The front one carries the porch. |
| End wall | 2 | 2.4 wide, 3.06 to the peak | The gables. The straight part is exactly the side wall height, which is what lets the box close. |
| Roof | 2 | 3.14 by 1.53 in | Cut to the gable slope plus an eave overhang, so the panels meet at the ridge. |
| Porch deck | 1 | 2.98 by 0.83 in | Sits flat on the board against the front wall. The posts stand on it. |
| Porch roof | 1 | 3.14 by 0.99 in | Leans from the front wall down to the post tops at about 27 degrees. |
| Post | 3 | 0.25 by 1.12 in | Two at the ends, one in the middle. The middle one is the one people skip and regret. |
The sheet says “scaled to fit” in the header, and that is true: the design is drawn at 3.6 by 3.9 by 3.7 inches and the packer shrank it to 82.7 percent so all eleven pieces fit one page. Print at 100 percent and you get the 2.98 inch house above, a good size for a first farmhouse and for a gingerbread village where several buildings share a table. Print at 121 percent and you get the design at full size, with the porch pieces landing on a second sheet.
Set the printer to Actual Size, never Fit to Page, then put a ruler on the 1 inch bar in the bottom corner before you cut a single piece. That bar is the whole check: if it measures an inch, every piece on the sheet is the size it says. If it does not, reprint. The templates page covers the print dialogs, the A4 and Letter difference, and its Scale Finder turns any target height into a print percentage. One farmhouse-specific rule: scale the whole sheet or nothing. A porch roof printed at a different percentage from the walls will not reach the wall, and no amount of icing fixes a panel that is a quarter inch short.
Say you want a farmhouse tall enough to be the centrepiece of a table, about 4.5 inches to the peak. The sheet’s house is 3.06 inches tall, so 4.5 divided by 3.06 is 147 percent. At that size the roof panels are 4.6 inches wide and the sheet no longer fits on one page, so the printer will spill pieces onto a second sheet. That is fine. What is not fine is printing the walls at 147 and the porch at 100 because the porch “looked small anyway”.
Dough and icing are on their own pages: the sturdy gingerbread house recipe for the panels, and the royal icing mortar that holds them. This walkthrough is only the farmhouse’s build order, and the order matters more here than on a plain house, because the porch loads the front wall from the side.
Print at Actual Size and measure the 1 inch bar with a ruler. If it reads 1 inch, print any extra copies you want; a second copy is useful because the paper pieces get greasy on the dough. If it reads anything else, change the print scaling and try again before touching flour.
Cut all eleven pieces out and lay them on dough rolled to an even quarter inch, with a finger’s width between them so the pieces do not fuse as they spread. Keep the three posts and the two roof panels on one tray together, because they are the pieces that must match each other most closely. A post baked on a different tray for a different time is the post that ends up a hair taller than its neighbours.
Bake low and slow, then lay each paper piece back on its panel and cut the edge true while the gingerbread is still hot enough to cut cleanly. King Arthur’s construction gingerbread instructions say to trim any rough edges while the pieces are still warm and to cool the pieces completely before building, and both halves of that matter. A warm panel cuts; a cold one snaps. Re-cut the posts against the same paper piece, all three, so they end up the same height to within the thickness of a knife line.
Pipe a thick bead along the vertical edges of an end wall, stand a side wall against it, and repeat around the box. Prop the corners with mugs or cans and leave it for two hours before the roof goes on, the same wait the icing page gives for any structural joint. The front wall is the one facing the edge of the board with the most room, because the porch needs 0.83 inches in front of it.
Run a bead along both gable slopes and along the top edge of both side walls, then set one roof panel and hold it until it stops sliding, usually under a minute with stiff icing. Set the second panel, pipe the ridge, and wait two more hours. The roof is finished before the porch begins, which is the opposite of how most people want to work and the reason the porch survives.
Turn the deck over, run icing along its back edge, and press it to the board tight against the front wall, so its long edge sits parallel to the wall with no gap. The deck is what the posts stand on, and a deck glued to the board is a deck the posts can push against. A deck glued only to the wall is a shelf, and shelves fold.
Pipe a small dot on the deck at each end and in the middle, stand a post in each, and pipe a second small bead around the base of each post where it meets the deck. Leave them until they hold without a hand, then leave them longer. The posts carry a roof that pushes outward as well as down, and a post that is still soft at the base will lean out under it.
Lay a thick line of icing across the front wall at the height of the post tops plus the roof’s lean, roughly 1.74 inches up the wall on the printed sheet, then rest the top edge of the porch roof in that line first. Lower the bottom edge onto the post tops, pipe along the top of each post where the roof meets it, and prop the outer edge with a small box until the wall joint is firm. Wall first, posts second, prop until firm. That sentence is the whole porch.
On a plain gingerbread house every joint does the same job: hold two panels at a right angle while the icing dries. A porch adds two joints that do a different job, and both of them fail in the same direction, outward and down.
Post to deck. The posts are the smallest pieces on the sheet, a quarter inch wide, and each one meets the deck in a joint the size of a fingernail. That joint is fine in compression. It is weak in shear, and shear is exactly what a leaning porch roof applies, because a roof leaning at 27 degrees pushes the post tops outward while gravity pulls them down. The fix is the second bead at the base of each post, piped after the post is standing, so the joint has a fillet on the outside face rather than a thin line underneath. The middle post exists for this reason: three posts share the outward push that two would carry alone.
Porch roof to wall. This joint is a line, not a corner. The roof edge meets the wall face at an angle, and the bead has to fill a wedge rather than a right angle. Pipe it thick, seat the roof into it while it is fresh, and prop the roof’s outer edge so the wall joint takes no load until it has set. If the porch roof goes on before the walls have cured, it pushes the front wall outward at the top, the front wall levers the whole box, and the roof you finished two hours ago opens at the ridge. That is why the order is roof first, porch last.
The Porch Rule: roof last, wall first, prop until firm. The main roof goes on and cures before any porch piece is touched. When the porch roof goes on, its wall edge is seated before its post edge. And the outer edge sits on a prop until you can lift the prop away and nothing moves. Everything else on this page is decoration.
Picture a build where the porch goes on at the same time as the roof, because it seemed efficient to do all the gluing at once. The posts are fresh, the wall joints are fresh, and the porch roof is a lever resting on both. Forty minutes later the front wall is a degree or two out of plumb, the porch roof has slid an eighth of an inch down the posts, and the ridge has a hairline gap. Nothing has fallen. It just does not look like the picture, and it never will. The same house built in the order above, with the porch two hours behind the roof, looks like the picture.
Board and batten is a wood siding pattern: wide vertical boards with narrow strips, the battens, nailed over the seams. The U.S. Forest Service’s wood siding bulletin lists it among the traditional rustic patterns for wood siding, and on a real modern farmhouse it is the single feature that makes the house read as one. In one home design thread the verdict on a house that wanted to stop looking like a farmhouse was blunt: it stays a farmhouse until the board and batten comes off. So it is the feature to get right on the gingerbread version, and it is only lines.
Pipe the battens on the flat panels before the walls go up, with the paper template underneath as a straightedge guide, using the same stiff icing as the mortar. Vertical lines a quarter inch apart on a 3 inch wall give you ten battens, which reads as siding. Half an inch apart gives you four, which reads as a fence. The planner below does the counting for your print size and tells you how much line you will pipe, which is more than it sounds: a whole house at a quarter inch spacing is around ninety inches of icing.
Board and Batten Planner
How many icing battens the farmhouse needs, and how much line you will pipe, at the size you printed.
Counts come from the template’s own wall sizes and your spacing; windows are assumed to be about half an inch wide and a little over half an inch tall, and each one removes the batten length behind it. Results are a planning estimate, not a guarantee of how much icing you will use. Nothing you enter leaves this page.
The rest of the look is three decisions. Black window frames: pipe the window outlines in black icing after the white battens have dried, so the black sits on top of white and does not bleed into it; our haunted house page has the black icing recipe that does not taste bitter. A metal-look roof: leave the roof panels plain and pipe evenly spaced vertical ribs down the slope, the standing seams of a metal roof, instead of shingles. And a porch that looks lived on: a wreath on the front door, a tiny bench cut from a scrap of gingerbread, and candy that sits on the deck rather than the roof. Our candy for a gingerbread house by part page sorts what sticks where.
If children are decorating, the flat panel rule is the one that saves the day. A six year old can pipe a straight line on a flat panel with a ruler beside it. Nobody can pipe a straight vertical line on a standing wall while the porch roof is still soft. Decorate flat, then build.
| What you see | Why | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Porch roof slides down the posts | The wall joint was not seated first, or the roof went on before the posts had set | Lift it off, wipe the icing, wait an hour, then re-seat wall edge first and prop the outer edge |
| Posts lean outward | Only a thin bead under each post; no fillet on the outside face | Pipe a second bead around the base of each post and prop the porch roof until the fillet sets |
| Porch roof does not reach the wall | The porch pieces were printed at a different scale from the walls, or the deck sits away from the wall | Push the deck tight to the wall; if the gap is more than an eighth of an inch, re-print the porch at the walls’ percentage |
| Roof panels do not meet at the ridge | The panels spread in the oven and were not re-cut hot | Trim the eave edge, not the ridge edge, so the panels still reach the peak |
| Pieces came out bigger than the paper | Spread. All gingerbread does it | Re-cut hot against the paper, per the templates page’s re-cut rule; a piece that has visibly puffed is faster to re-roll |
| The whole sheet printed small | Fit to Page was on | Measure the bar, switch to Actual Size, reprint |
| Front wall leans out after the porch goes on | The porch loaded a wall that had not cured | Remove the porch roof, prop the wall plumb, wait overnight, then rebuild the porch alone |
The porch adds two cure stages to the plain house, and that is why this build wants two days. The panels can be baked up to a week ahead and kept in a tin. The icing page’s rule is two hours before a roof goes on, four before candy, and overnight before a house is moved, and the porch stages take the same two hour structural wait each. Walls in the morning, roof at noon, porch the next morning, and the house is decorated and safe to move by the second evening.
If you only have one afternoon, build the box and roof, decorate the porch pieces flat while they cure, and put the porch on last thing before you stop. Then leave it alone until morning. A one-day build that also moves the house that night is the build that arrives at the party with the porch in a bag.
Farmhouse Build Clock
The porch adds two cure stages the classic house does not have. Enter when the walls go up and get a clock time for every stage.
Cure times are the royal icing guidance from our gingerbread house icing page: two hours before a roof goes on, four before candy, overnight before the house is moved. Warm or humid kitchens run longer. This is a schedule, not a promise; check each joint by hand before loading it. Nothing you enter leaves this page.
Baked panels keep about two weeks airtight at room temperature, the same window as any gingerbread cookie, but they cut cleanly only in the first few days; after that the porch posts, the thinnest pieces, go leathery first, so re-cut hot on baking day rather than later. Store the built house uncovered in a dry room. Cover it and the icing softens, and the porch roof is the first thing to sag. For how long the finished house stays edible versus how long it stays standing, see how long a gingerbread house lasts.
Yes, if the front wall is at least 2 inches tall. Print only the porch pieces from this sheet at the percentage that makes the deck match your front wall’s width, and attach the porch roof about half an inch below your eave. The joints and the order are the same.
Because that is where a farmhouse porch goes. A porch under a gable is a cottage; a porch along the eave is a farmhouse, and it is also the stronger arrangement, because the porch roof leans against a straight wall instead of a peaked one.
You can, and two posts will hold a 3 inch porch on a good day. The middle post is there for the outward push described above, and it costs one quarter inch strip of dough. Keep it.
Yes. The same sheet cut from card makes a cardboard gingerbread house with a real porch, and a card porch does not sag, which makes it a good practice run for the joints before you commit dough.
At 100 percent the eleven pieces cover about 42 square inches of quarter inch dough, so one batch of our construction recipe makes the farmhouse with panels to spare. Scale the area by the square of the print percentage: 147 percent needs about 2.2 times the dough.
The gingerbread is. The mortar is the question, because traditional royal icing is raw egg white; use the meringue powder version from our icing page if the house is going to be eaten rather than looked at.
The other ten printable shapes, including the gingerbread barn template that pairs with this farmhouse for a farm scene, are on the templates page. Read our gingerbread house tips before the first build, and if the season is short, the rated gingerbread house kits page grades every box on the icing it ships with, which is what decides whether a porch stands.
The farmhouse is the first template on this site drawn with a porch that has its own deck and posts, because a porch that is only a roof glued to a wall is the porch that ends up on the floor. Print the sheet, measure the bar, build the box and roof first, and give the porch its own two hours. If you would rather start from a box, our guide to the best gingerbread house kits grades every kit on its icing, which is the part that decides whether any porch stands.