Our house is done! Okay, that may be stretching the truth ever so slightly. To be more exact, our little gingerbread house is done.
It’s a scaled down version of our actual house… well, more or less at least! I made a scale drawing of our home, including the windows. After baking the gingerbread, I reused the template to stab trough the corners of each window onto the gingerbread. Then all I needed to do was connect the dots. Very simple.
The roof tiles are made of chocolate buttons, the ridge tiles and the gable decoration are made out of smarties, the chimney, paneling at the back of the house are chocolate fingers and the edging around the base of the house is jelly beans.
This is the recipe that we used:
Ingredients:
250g unsalted butter
200g dark muscovado sugar
7 tbsp golden syrup
600g plain flower
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
4 tsp ginger
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 200°C. Melt the butter, sugar and syrup in a pan. In a separate large bowl, mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and ground ginger. When the sugar butter mixture is completely combined, add it to the flour mixture. Mix the ingredients to form a stiff dough. Be careful, as it will be hot!
- Roll out some of your dough on some baking paper (it will stick to your work surface). Try to roll it out as evenly as possible. It should be about 5 mm thick.
- Cut out the parts of your house using your chosen template. (There are loads of ready made templates available on the Internet)
- Bake your sections in the oven for about 10 minutes. If the pieces are smaller they probably won’t need as long in the oven, so keep an eye on them! Also don’t bake them all in one go, as they will expand slightly and you will have to trim them back to size with the help of your template. This is much easier to do when they are still warm!
- Let them cool completely. Then you can start to assemble your house! I cheated a bit with the icing and bought ready made stuff. For the snow I mixed an egg white and some icing sugar to a thick paste and applied it with a spoon. Either would work fine to assemble the house.
It was plenty to make our house and we even had some left over for a few gingerbread biscuits.
In case you hadn’t already guessed from my icing capabilities, I didn’t make the snowman myself. I saw him at the supermarket and couldn’t resist…
Very cute, isn’t he?
I’m really happy with my first ever gingerbread house attempt. I was surprised how easy it was! Okay, my icing lines are a bit wonky, but who cares!
Have you attempted a gingerbread house? We’d love to hear how you got on and see your results.
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