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Gingerbread House Project
Making a
Gingerbread house is a fun project, but takes a bit of time! For those of
you that have time, I will explain the whole process here so you can try it
yourself. For those of you that want to skip a few steps, join us for a
Gingerbread house decorating class, where you receive your house already
baked, and you will have the fun job of putting all the pieces together and
decorating it! This project is suitable for adults and moms with kids older
than 10.
Let's have a
look at the process of building a Gingerbread house from scratch!
We used an old
trusted recipe for making the dough. The recipe makes enough dough to
create one of these standard size houses.
Here is the recipe:
Cream until
light and fluffy:
230g butter
100g brown sugar
Then add
and blend on a low speed:
250g molasses
Sift, add
and blend all the ingredients until all the flour is absorbed:
630g all
purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 teaspoons ground ginger
½ teaspoon salt
Then add
and blend:
177ml cold
water
First mix the
butter, sugar and molasses together until light and fluffy. Next, we add all
the dry ingredients, and a quarter cup of water.
The dough gets
quite hard to mix at this point, so unless you have one of those industrial
mixers, I suggest you turn to mixing it with your hands as it is turning
into knee able dough. 
Keep on
kneading the dough until it has a smooth soft consistency.
 Spread
the dough onto a baking tin, cover with cling foil and put in the
refrigerator overnight. (Yes, unfortunately the process of baking a
Gingerbread house can take up to 3 days!)
If you really
can't wait overnight, let the dough stay in the fridge for at least 3
hours.
While waiting
for the dough to mature, cut out the template of your
house on a sturdy piece of
cardboard, we use the template pieces to cut the dough. If you cut
them on a durable enough base you will be able to use it on quite a few
houses - this will save a lot of time and energy!
When you take
the dough out of the refrigerator it will have quite a hard consistency, so
get on it and knead it into the soft consistency you had it in before.Once
the dough is soft and pliable, roll it out to no less than half a centimeter
thickness on a flat table surface covered with flour and wax paper.
 Place
the pieces of your house template onto the flattened dough, and cut out the
desired pieces.
Remember to cut
out two of parts that indicate you will need to complete the design of your
house. Transfer the cut out pieces of the house onto the baking tray.
Take care not to stretch the pieces when transferring them to the baking
tray (that's why the wax paper is so useful).
Always bake
the bigger pieces together, and the smaller pieces together, if you mix them
some of the smaller pieces may burn while the bigger pieces are not properly
baked yet.
Bake your house
parts in the oven for approx 20 minutes - until they are golden brown, not
black. They should not be soft anymore.
When
removing the baking sheet from the oven, leave the pieces on it for at least
half an hour, before removing them, otherwise they will bend, crack and
break.
Leave the
finished pieces uncovered overnight to harden and dry.
We are now ready to assemble and decorate our house
To decorate and assemble the house we use Royal icing and a variety of
sweets we bought from our local sweet shop. You will see that when building
gingerbread houses you will not be able to resist walking past a sweet shop,
but not for the same reasons you previously stopped to look in the window!
I decided on a
farmhouse theme, and Claudette had a more fantasy theme in mind so let’s
follow the progress of the assembly and decoration of our two houses...
It is wise to
ice on windows while you can still lay the pieces flat.
The icing dries
quite quickly so it is not necessary to hold the pieces together for too
long before adding the next piece. Our house consist of the four walls, the
roof, a chimney and the porch.
Once the walls
are sturdy, we add the porch and pillars.
For the one
house's pillars I used pretzels dipped in chocolate. For the fantasy house
we used a strawberry covered tube cookie, they looked really yummy!
Next we added
the roof - we had to
wait for the walls to be completely dry or the weight of the roof
would pull them apart.
While waiting
for the walls to dry completely, I added some "grass" by smearing green
coloured icing around the house of the cake tray.
With the roof
firmly in place it was time to try my hand at the chimney, the most
difficult part of the whole house.
Fortunately if
you pieces don't fit exactly, or if you have imperfections in your house
(remember you are working with dough and variables - it is never perfect)
you can cover it up with icing or fake "stones"!! :)
While I chose a
more rugged look for the farm house, we neatly tiled "bricks" onto the
fantasy house chimney.
Now we give free
reign to our imagination, and play!
We decorated
the fantasy house with multi
coloured marshmallows, and giant jelly tots on the porch. We used
coconut ice for "grass" and chocolate chips for the gravel road.
The front of
the porch was decorated with round chewy sweets, cut in half. Little pieces
of yellow liquorish let the light shine through the windows.
For the
farmhouse I chose an old "tiled" look for the roof, and also used the rounds
for the porch. I decided to add a little pot plant and a pumpkin on the
roof made of icing and green liquorish.
I think the
houses turned out pretty good! for these houses we used the "basic"
gingerbread house template we also use when presenting our Gingerbread house
decorating course.
Feel like
building your own house for Xmas?
Why not buy your own
Gingerbread house Decorating Kit today, and have fun!
Why not
. You will receive your
house in pre-baked parts and will have the enjoyable job of piecing it
together and decorating it!
The kit
includes: the complete
gingerbread house, and all the basic sweets and icing you need to create a
beautiful house using the Basic House template.
Our latest
house Pictures:
Bright idea!!! Fill it with sweets and use it as desert after the meal!
The Kit costs
R210 and includes pre baked house parts, with sweets to do the decorations,
your basic dough- and icing recipes, lots of tips and tricks and icing (you
will just have to add eggs to the icing)!
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