Make a cute Peeps house (Easter gingerbread houses)

In today’s post: Looking for a cute Easter craft for kids? Make an adorable peeps house out of graham crackers and candy.

Your kids bored yet? Mine are staying pretty busy during the day with online learning, but the late afternoon/evening hours are starting to feel a little long. We’ve been playing more games together as a family, which is great, but I can already tell that we’re going to need to dream up lots of activities to keep everyone occupied.

One of our family’s favorite Christmas traditions is making gingerbread houses, so we decided to make Peeps houses for Easter. Because traditional gingerbread houses can be a ton of work, we simplified the process using graham crackers. I’m sharing step by step instructions for putting the houses together so they won’t collapse!

We used spring M&Ms to make a pretty roof, but your kids can decorate the houses any way they like!

Making a Peeps House TIPS

Before we start, I have two important tips for making and decorating Peeps houses (or any graham cracker houses):

1. If you won’t be eating the houses, it’s SO MUCH EASIER to glue them together with hot glue instead of icing. You can glue each house together in minutes with hot glue and you don’t have to wait for things to dry before decorating. Older kids (9+) are usually ok to use a low temp hot glue gun with parent supervision to glue together their own houses. Even younger kids could help you glue the house together if you are working with one or two children at a time. Then kids can still go crazy with icing to attach all the candy decorations.
2. If you choose to construct the houses using royal icing, I recommend putting the houses together in advance and then letting kids decorate them. Most kids just don’t have the patience to wait even 10 minutes to let the house set up before they want to decorate, and that leads to walls collapsing and kids crying. BTDT and it’s not fun. But if you construct the houses 15-20 minutes in advance, the icing will have set up and they’ll be nice and solid. Then kids can decorate to their heart’s content.

How to Make a Peeps House VIDEO

Watch this video to see how we made our Peeps houses. Detailed instructions follow the video. Please note, if the video isn’t showing up below, that means you are using an ad-blocker. Whitelist this site in order to see the video. I know no one likes watching ads, but they allow me to create tons of free content for you. Thanks!

 

Peeps House Supplies

For each Peeps house you will need:

• 3 full graham crackers
• Hot Glue or Royal Icing
• 1 Peep
• M&Ms, sprinkles, or other desired candy for decorating

You can make your own royal icing with egg whites, powdered sugar, and lemon juice. I have used this recipe before – it doesn’t make tons of icing so if you are making more than a couple houses you may want to double it.

How to construct an Easter Graham Cracker house

Start by breaking each of the 3 graham crackers in half. I like to use a sharp knife to score the crackers before I break them to make sure they break evenly.

Take one of the graham cracker halves and cut it in half again. Then cut it as shown below to create a triangle roof support. When cutting a graham cracker, slide the knife back and forth in a sawing motion. As long as you don’t push too hard you should get a nice clean cut.

Place some royal icing in a sandwich bag and clip off a corner. Pipe icing along the top edge of a graham cracker half, and then “glue” that graham cracker half to the bottom of the triangle you just cut. That makes the back wall of the house.

Next, use two more graham cracker halves to form a roof. You can see exactly how I do this in the video up above.

Finally use the last two graham cracker halves to form outside walls.

At this point you want to let the icing harden for AT LEAST 15 minutes before moving on. Once everything is hardened, you can pick up the house and pipe icing along the bottom edges of the walls, then place it down on a paper plate.

Now it’s time to decorate! I started by gluing a peep inside the house – it’s easiest if you slice the bottom of the peep off so it’s level. Then you can use M&Ms, sprinkles, or any other candy to decorate the house.

Looking for more fun Easter projects? Visit these posts:

20 fun Easter crafts for kids

33 ways to decorate Easter eggs

Easter traditions to start with your family