How to Make a Gingerbread House

Gingerbread cookies are a great Christmas treat, easy to make, taste great, can be made in the most festive shapes and can be decorated in many different ways. Many people even use gingerbread cookies as decorations around the house or as ornaments for the Christmas tree. Especially in Europe, gingerbread is an integral part of Christmas. Of all the various ways of presenting the gingerbread, the most spectacular and most rewarding is the traditional gingerbread house. Making and assembling your own gingerbread house can be intimidating, but if you plan ahead and know the essential techniques creating a delicious centerpiece that will be the talk of the party.

The first step to becoming a culinary architect is to make a great gingerbread dough, if you want to skip this step and get right into the baking you can by ready made dough at many stores. Make sure you get enough dough to build your creation, 5 lbs. should be enough to build a medium sized house using the techniques in this article. If you prefer to make the dough from scratch, follow the recipe below.

Gingerbread recipe

4 cups flour

3 tsp ground ginger

2 tsp cinnamon

2 tsp all spice

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp baking soda

2 sticks of unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup molasses

2 egg yolks

Preparation:

Mix the flour, the spices, baking soda and baking powder in a bowl. In a large bowl, mix together the butter and sugar with a mixer until the butter turns white, then beat in the molasses and the egg yolks. Carefully mix in the flour mixture until the dough is smooth.

Put the dough in a storage bag and put it in the fridge for at least 3 hours.

Designing your gingerbread house

While the dough is cooling down, it's time to create the cutouts for your house design. The most common and easies design is a rectangle floor plan with a slanted roof. This design is very straight forward and consists of two rectangles for the side walls, two larger rectangles for the roof, and two end walls that hold up the roof. If you are feeling creative, there's virtually now end to the different variations you can come up with. Many people like to make models of their own house, while others go to great lengths to replicate famous buildings from around the world. The only limitations are your imagination, and the size of your cookie sheets. The easiest way to create your cutouts is to draw out the different shapes you need on a large piece of paper and cut them out, you'll be able to cut the gingerbread dough around these paper cutouts when it's time to start baking the different pieces.

While designing the house you might also want to give some thought to how the house will be displayed. One fun way of creating a nice Christmas scene is to prepare a serving tray to serve as a display for the gingerbread house. Again, you can decorate the surroundings any way you want, but a common way of creating a Christmas theme is to cover the tray in cotton, which creates a nice snowy landscape. Another great idea is to create some gingerbread men and women at the same time you make the parts for the house, this cookies can be decorated and placed around the house to add to the scene. In the same way you can add gingerbread animals or trees, or even smaller buildings. Again, your imagination is the only thing limiting what you could do, and how much dough you've made.

Baking the gingerbread

Gingerbread is much easier to work with when it is cold, sop depending on how much dough you've made it's a good idea to not take it all out of the fridge right away, cut of a nice working piece, and leave the rest in the fridge to stay cool.

Before you start rolling out the dough, sprinkle your work area lightly with flour, and give the rolling pin a coat of flour as well. Always keep flour handy to re apply flour to the work bench as needed.

Gingerbread dough has a tendency to crack at the edges when you are using the rolling pin, so moving it around too much and flipping it over while working with the dough will not work too well. Instead, alternate between rolling out the dough top to bottom and side to side. Often when the dough shows signs of cracking, changing the direction you use the rolling pin will get the dough to settle nicely. Keep rolling until the dough is about 1/4 inch think, if you are making a very big house, with large sections, you'll need the dough to be thicker, but for most gingerbread houses this should be a good thickness. Now it's time to cut out the pieces that will make up the finished house, and that is done by putting down the paper cutouts you've made earlier on the dough, and cutting around the edges with a knife. Ty to fit as many pieces together as possible, the fewer times you have to work leftover dough back in with the rest of your dough, the better. If you know that you have plenty of dough for your house, you might want to make some gingerbread cookies from the parts of the dough that are left over before you start on the next piece of fresh dough from the fridge. Remove all the excess dough around your cut outs, and put the pieces on a cookie sheet. Depending on the sizes of the pieces and the thickness of your dough, it might be necessary to use a spatula to move the pieces safely to the cookie sheet.

Put the cookie sheet in the oven for 14 minutes at about 190 degrees, when the cookies are turning a nice golden brown they are done. Let the cookies cool down on a cooling rack. The cookies will be slightly soft while hot, so handle them carefully when transferring them over to the cooling rack.

Gather the excess dough and work it back into a fresh batch of gingerbread dough from the fridge, and create the rest of the pieces you need for the house.

Assembling the house

Putting the house together is one of the most challenging, but also one of the most fun parts of creating a gingerbread house. It is possible to put the house together using sugar glaze, but for this recipe we are going to make hard caramel for a nice solid structure. To make the caramel, put a large frying pan on medium high heat. You want to make sure the pan is big enough for you to dip the sides of the house in the caramel. Add about a pound of sugar to the pan, again the size of the house you are making will determine how much sugar you need, but for our recipe we will use one pound. This will be more caramel than we need, but for putting the house together we want to make sure we have plenty of caramel.

Keep stirring the sugar in the pan with a wooden spoon, the sugar will crystallize before it starts to melt. When the sugar is completely melted, pull the skillet off the heat and remove the wooden spoon. Next, take two of the wall pieces that will form a corner. Dip both edges that will meet into the melted sugar, let the excess sugar run off before pressing the walls together at a right angel, making sure the melted sugar forms a solid bond between the two walls. Hold the walls together for about a minute, letting the sugar harden as it cools. Take care not to spill the melted sugar as this is very warm and sticks to your skin if you touch it. For this reason, do not let children help out with this process. Also, the sugar will harden quickly when it is out of the pan so try to be as quick as you can in connecting the walls for the best possible results.

Once your two walls are glued firmly together, pick up both pieces and dip the next corner in the sugar before getting the next wall piece, and repeating the process until you have three walls glued together, making sure the corners are at right angles. When the three walls are stable, pick up the entire structure and dip the two remaining sides into the sugar, and attach the remaining wall piece in the same way as the previous walls. You know have your basic house layout, and I recommend that you start with this basic design, even if you are planning to make a more complex gingerbread house. It is a lot easier to add pieces onto this design, than to try to put together complicated structures.

With the basic shape in place, it's time to add the roof. This is done by picking up the house and flipping it over, dipping all the edges that will face the roof into the sugar mix. If your pan is not big enough to fit the house, you can use a spoon or knife to smear the sugar onto the connecting pieces instead of dipping the house. With all the connecting edges ready, put the roof piece in place and hold it in position for several minutes. The roof pieces will have a tendency to slide down if they are not held in place until the sugar has hardened completely. With the first piece of the roof in place, repeat the process for the other part of the roof, and your gingerbread house is done!

Decorating the house

Decorating the house is typically the part where the whole family can get involved and have a great time together. Kids will love adding their favorite candy to the house, and they will really feel like they have participated in the process when the house is done and proudly displayed. For decoration, you can use virtually anything, but typically candy canes and hard candy work very well. Keep in mind that the house will probably be on display for a few days, so things like marshmallows can tend to get a little stale, so using gumdrops, good and plenties, hard mint candies etc. might be better. To attach the various goodies to the house, you can either use the frosting you can get at the store, or make your own powdered sugar frosting by adding a few drops of water to powdered sugar. If you make your own frosting, make sure it is very thick as the decorations will slide off the house if the frosting is too thin.

Good luck with your gingerbread house, I hope you will enjoy this special Christmas tradition.