Just making biscuits wasn’t enough for us this christmas, so we set ourself an architectural challenge of constructing an adorable gingerbread house! Now making a gingerbread house is super cute and fun but it’s also much more challenging than we originally thought! So we thought we would make it easier for you by including our template for you to use.
Gingerbread houses are fun and all, until you decide to make your own design and template and realise that you did need Pythagoras’ theorem you learnt age 13 after all… fortunately we’ve saved you the headache and have included a template we created. The last place we thought we’d use the theory (which we considered entirely pointless at the time) was whilst working on a creation for our baking blog!
Download our template here – Baking a Mess – Gingerbread house template
This gingerbread recipe is both delicious and nice and strong so is ideal for making houses, or any other structure that takes your fancy. We also used this gingerbread recipe to create cute little advent cookies which we are posting every day on our Instagram, so make sure to go and check it out!
- 700g plain flour
- 200g butter cubed
- 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
- 1 tbsp ginger
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 350g light brown sugar
- 2 eggs
- 8 tbsp golden syrup
- Put the flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices in a large bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer.
- Add in the butter and rub together with your fingers until you have a breadcrumb like consistency.
- Mix in the sugar so it is well combined.
- In a separate bowl beat together the eggs and golden syrup.
- Pour about a third of the egg mixture into the bowl and mix together with either a paddle attachment on the mixer or a wooden spoon.
- Add the rest of the egg and syrup and continue mixing together until the mixture comes together to form a dough.
- Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for about 30 mins.
- Roll the dough out to 3-5mm thick and cut out your house pieces.
- Bake at 190°C for 8-15 mins depending the size of the pieces you’re baking, walls of the house and the roof will need longer but little pieces for the door etc will only need 8-10 mins.
- Allow to cool completely before starting construction!
To decorate our house we used royal icing and an assortment of sweets like jelly tots and chocolate buttons. Decorating a gingerbread house is a great time to let your creativity run wild. We decided to create a few extra pieces for decoration from the gingerbread like a door, picket fence and even a christmas tree. We predominately used icing to decorate our house just because thats what we felt like doing, but other ideas, like to create roof tiles out of chocolate buttons and colourful smarties or jelly beans wherever you please look just as cute!
To make our house look adorably snow covered, we piped dribbles of snow on the roof, put icicles on any ledge we could find and covered the ground in icing (the same way you would flood icing when decorating a cookie) and then covered everything in a dusting of icing sugar. And glitter, of course we added glitter…
Our advent calendar gingerbread was also really easy to make, it’s gingerbread so it lasts all month and is a great, fun alternative to buying the chocolate advent calendars. They would make such a good activity for children too, just use any cookie cutters you have and decorate with icing, we chose a classic white royal icing so that it set solid and lasts longer, but you can stick on sweets or add colouring to your icing and decorate as you please!
