Gingerbread House Adventures

This Christmas Season I discovered the fun of making Gingerbread houses! In total I made 2 full size and 1 mini one and I am definitely all gingerbread-ed out for the year. 

Gingerbread House Take 1

The first I made was to raffle off for the charity I work for. It was the first one I have ever made and was definitely a learning experience! I scoured the net for recipes and ideas and ended up using this recipe for the dough and this template for the various pieces. 

Some things I learnt: 

• When it says to roll the dough out to 5mm ROLL THE DOUGH OUT TO 5mm... not thicker. Not only do you run out of dough but the pieces are very heavy and harder to work with.
• The dough itself was quite sticky to work with and kept sticking to the rolling pin
• To stick the walls together I used Nestle's white chocolate melts. The trick though is to melt it and then leave it until it's the consistency of putty before using, otherwise it's too runny and doesn't set in time to hold the pieces together.
• I used Royal Icing from the supermarket to do the piping details but I wasn't happy with the look of it. On my next houses I simply used chocolate for everything. 
• Go cray with the white chocolate and Icing sugar- it will hide all multitude of sins!

Gingerbread House Take 2

I took those lessons and set about making another house for our family Christmas.

This time I decided to use a different gingerbread recipe as the first one used honey instead of golden syrup so wasn't as caramel-ly tasting as I would have liked. I once again took to the internet but found it difficult to find a 'Gingerbread House' recipe that sounded tasty- they all seemed to be more functional/structural focussed. So I took a risk and used this recipe which is just for gingerbread cookies. I didn't know how much it would make so i did a double batch and turned out getting one full size house, one half size house and 2 trays of cookies out of it!

It was the centrepiece of our Christmas Eve celebrations and was destroyed with an empty bottle of Asti!

This Time:

• For some reason the templates printed smaller than the first time without me realising but it was still plenty big enough for 8 of us with plenty left over.
• The dough was easy to work with when rolling and was absolutely delicious! Just the right amount of spice and everyone commented on how tasty it was. 
• The only problem was that the pieces were a bit softer than the first recipe and 2 broke when I was transferring them off the hot trays but that was easily fixed by gluing them back together with chocolate. 
• I made my own Royal Icing with this recipe but again I liked the look and workability of the chocolate better. 

As I mentioned previously I did make a half sized one which was for my Grandma who was stuck quarantined in her nursing home over Christmas due to a Norovirus outbreak. She didn't get it luckily but it was horrible because Christmas is her favourite time of the year and she couldn't get out to be with her family. So I made her the little house, which she loved, but I forgot to take photos! Oops! To make the mini one I just used the same template but cut a 2cm border off each edge of each template piece.

I think of the two, I prefer the decorations of the first one, because as it was larger it was less cramped and could fit more/looks neater. The 'G' on the front of the family house is personalised  for our last name 'Glanville'

So the moral of the story is:

• make sure you get a tasty recipe
• use chocolate instead of icing
• make sure your pieces aren't too thick

All in all it's really not that hard- just time consuming and fiddly- but the looks on everyone's face when they see them and the joy they bring when destroying and eating is definitely worth it!