Gingerbread House

Christmas is just around the corner and we wanted to spread some good old Christmas cheer with a recipe for a fun, festive gingerbread house. It’s easy to bake, easy to make and easy to decorate. If you’ve got kids they’ll love helping to decorate it…just keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t eat all the sweets!

Ingredients

• 250g unsalted butter
• 7 tbsp golden syrup
• 200g dark muscovado sugar
• 600g plain flour
• 5 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Rooftop Decorations

• 500g icing sugar
• 2 large egg whites
• 250g of Jazzie sweets, milk buttons, chocolate fingers etc.
• Marshmellows or any other sweets you want to decorate the house with

Downloadable template

• Click here to download »

Instructions

1. Download and cut out the above template.
2. Preheat the oven to 200°C (Gas mark 6). Melt the butter, golden syrup and caster sugar in a sauce pan over a low heat.
3. Combine the flour, ground ginger and bicarbonate of soda in a large mixing bowl. Next, pour in the butter mixture whilst it’s still warm and continue to mix until it forms a stiff dough.
4. Roll out a ¼ of the dough mixture onto some greaseproof paper to a thickness of about 5mm. Lay one of the template cut outs onto the rolled out dough and use a knife to cut around it. Repeat with the remaining dough, until you have 2 front and back walls, 2 side panels and 2 roof panels. Leftover dough can be used to make little doors, windows, chimney tiles or just some little gingerbread cookies if you prefer.
5. Each gingerbread panel needs to be baked for about 12 mins or until the edges start to darken. Leave them to cool for a few mins to firm up. Then trim around the templates again to straighten the edges. Leave the panels to cool fully before moving onto the construction.
6. Mix the icing sugar and egg whites together to make the thick royal icing which will act as the cement holding the gingerbread house together. Fill a piping bag with the royal icing and pipe a good amount of icing along all sides of the panels, joining the wall panels together as you go. Leave the wall structure to dry and stiffen before attaching the roof panels and holding them in place for a few mins to set.
7. Add a few drops of water to the left over icing to make it slightly more runny. Then carefully spoon the royal icing onto the roof, letting it drip down to form pretty icicles. Whilst the roof icing is still a little wet you need to put the roof tiles on (jazzies, milk buttons etc.).
8. Now it’s time to go crazy! You can decorate your gingerbread house however you like, using blobs of icing to attach your sweets. We used smarties as the Christmas lights along the roof edges but you could use anything you like…m&ms, chocolate drops, mini-marshmellows, gummy sweets etc.

It’s best eaten within a week but can last longer…if you can resist eating it!

We hope you have fun making your own gingerbread house. Show us how well you did by uploading a photo of your gingerbread masterpieces onto our facebook page here.