If you haven’t done one yet, Boxing Day is a great time to make a gingerbread house. Sure, you’ve already got your decorations up, and the thought of eating any more is probably a bit too much for you. But it’s still nice to have the smell of gingerbread waft through the house, and you’ll make such lovely houses, you won’t be tempted to eat them for a very long time.
That’s why we’re going to show you how to make a gingerbread house. We’ve taken the recipe from the BBC Good Food website, as it has a step-by-step guide and a template for the gingerbread pieces, but there are hundreds of recipes online if you want to use another one.
Use the photos included as inspiration as well, to really let your creative side out.
1. Make the gingerbread dough.
This simple recipe will make enough dough for one house.
250g of unsalted butter
200g of dark muscovado sugar
7 tbsp of golden syrup
600g of plain flour
2 tsp of bicarbonate of soda
4 tsp of ground ginger
Heat the oven to about 200°C (gas mark 6 or 180°C for fan-assisted ovens). Melt the butter, sugar and syrup together in one pan. In a large bowl, mix the other ingredients together. Once the butter mixture is melted and smooth, mix it in with the flour mixture. Combine well, and add water if it’s a bit too dry. It does need to be thick enough to be rolled but moist enough to hold together without being too crumb-y.
2. Roll out the dough, and cut out the house shapes.
Line your work surface with baking paper, and plop the dough onto it. Roll the dough out. It should be about the thickness of two stacked pound coins, or about 6 millimetres.
Cut out the shapes of the walls (there should be at least four) and the two halves of the roof. After you cut out each shape, gently slide the shape onto its own piece of baking paper and pop that onto a baking sheet. Repeat until you have all the pieces on a baking sheet. You can make leftover dough into gingerbread men or trees, if you like.
The Good Food website also suggests taking flaked almond and poking the most intact ones into the roof pieces to mimic roof tiles. If you want to do this, do it at this point.
Put the pieces in the preheated oven for about 12 minutes, or until the pieces are firm and a bit darker at the edges than in the middle.
Pull them out, and set them aside to cool for a couple of minutes. Once they are a bit firmer, trim up the pieces to make them nice and even, and to ensure all the edges are straight. Then leave the pieces to cool completely.
3. Assemble the house, using icing to hold everything together.
Start by making the icing. Take two egg whites, and sift in about 500g of icing sugar a bit at a time. You want an icing that is thick and smooth. Place the icing in a piping bag with a medium nozzle, and stick the walls together by piping a generous line of icing on each edge. Then press the corners together.
If you can, place a small bowl or appropriately sized object in the middle of the house. This will support the walls as the icing dries. The icing will take a couple of hours to harden completely, and in the meantime, you don’t want the seals breaking and the walls falling over.
Once the walls are dry, remove the support, and put the roof on the walls. Depending on the pitch of the roof, you may need to hold these pieces in place for a couple of minutes while the icing hardens enough to hold them in place.
Allow the house to dry completely, which will probably be overnight.
4. Decorate the house with the candy of your choice.
The Good Food website has a specific set of instructions for decorating your house, but the great thing about gingerbread houses is that you can use any candy you want (or happen to have to hand) to decorate your house.
Chocolate fingers make a good door, and silver or gold decorative balls make cute doorknobs. Small candies like Smarties are pretty standard roof decorations, and candy canes make good columns.
You could just try looking at your candy in a new, imaginative way, then throw it randomly at your house to see what sticks. It’s up to you entirely.
What do you think you’ll use to decorate your gingerbread house? What else will you be doing today?
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