Gingerbread House

To get in the mood for Christmas I thought it was about time I tried making a festive Gingerbread House, with a bit of help from my cousin! I found a very simple recipe on BBC Good Food which even has templates that you can print out to use!

Ingredients

• 250g butter
• 200g muscovado sugar
• 7tbsp golden syrup
• 600g plain flour
• 4tsp ground ginger

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees and then melt the butter, muscovado sugar and syrup in a saucepan. Next mix the flour and ginger together in a large bowl and then stir in the melted butter mixture until it's made a dough. I added a bit of extra flour as my dough seemed to be a bit too soft!


Now roll out the mixture so that it's roughly 2cm thick and then either cut out the shapes freehand or use the template from the Good Food recipe as a guide. I printed one copy of the template off and then dotted holes around the edge for each shape, so that I could cut the shape out after removing the template. I made stars out of the excess mixture which are nice to keep as a separate snack! 

Once you have all of your shapes cut out, place them on a baking sheet or baking parchment and then on a baking tray. Cook for 12 mins or until golden, then leave to cool. Good Food recommend that you trim the shapes again with the templates. Although this would have made my house neater, I didn't want to risk breaking the gingerbread, at least not on my first try!

Now you need to make the icing and start assembling the house:

• 2 egg whites
• 500g icing sugar

Whisk the egg whites until fluffy then add the icing sugar, a little bit at a time. The icing will be quite tough but this will help weld the gingerbread together to make it sturdy! Now spread a little bit of the icing on each edge of the house's walls and stick together. Support the walls with weights (I used bags of flour) to help hold it in place until the icing has dried. Leave for roughly 45 mins and then stick the roof panels on with the icing. Hold the panels until the icing is dry enough to hold them. Then leave for another 30 mins until completely dry.

You're now ready to decorate! Of course the design is up to you, I used icing and white chocolate buttons for the snowy roof, cut up chocolate fingers for the windows and doors and put on strawberry laces and coloured balls for fairy lights. To help stick the decorations on, make some runny icing to use as glue!

And voila, one gingerbread house!