How To Make A Gingerbread House

I was sent an amazing Lakeland Gingerbread House Kit in order to take part in a challenge to build a Gingerbread House.

 

The kit contained everything I needed except for an egg and lemon juice for the icing and was really easy to use.

Although it's totally gorgeous it felt like cheating and I decided it needed an extra something, so, with help from my able 3 year old assistant, I made more Gingerbread...

 I took my recipe for Gingerbread from the BBC Good Food website. 

Ingredients

• 350g/12oz plain flour, plus extra for rolling out
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 125g/4½oz butter
• 175g/6oz light soft brown sugar
• 1 free-range egg
• 4 tbsp golden syrup

Method

Sift together the flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and cinnamon.
Add the butter and rub together or blend in a food processor until the mix looks like breadcrumbs.
Stir in the sugar.
Lightly beat the egg and golden syrup together, add to the flour/sugar mix and beat with a wooden spoon or food processor until the mixture clumps together.
Tip the dough out, knead briefly until smooth, wrap in clingfim and leave to chill in the fridge for 15 minutes.

It's important to allow the dough time to rest and you will find it much less sticky and far easier to work with.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Line two baking trays with greaseproof paper

Roll the dough out to a 0.5cm/¼in thickness on a lightly floured surface.
Cut out the shapes and place on the baking tray, leaving a gap between them.

Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until lightly golden-brown. Leave on the tray for 10 minutes and then move to a wire rack to finish cooling. Be really careful because it will be very soft and bendy and easily broken when it's still warm.

Only once completely cool can you decorate and make your chosen creation. My 3 year old was VERY helpful with the faces...

We like our nativity scene, but decided we wanted to make something REALLY special, and we are The Brick Castle, so we made a castle.

I had to find a suitable template, and cut 4 pieces of equal size. I used the rounded shape to make my windows.

Before it was cool, I used a Lego brick to make 'bricks' on the gingerbread.

It all sticks together with Royal Icing - 1 egg white beaten until it's fluffy, add 250 g icing sugar and a few drops of lemon juice. It sets really hard quite quickly. 

My 16 year old brought me the perfect occupant for my house! A Lego Gingerbread Man.

I bought some sweets from the corner shop and chopped up some of my home made fudge
from 2 weeks ago. Coloured some of the icing and decorating could begin.

I'm really pleased with it and we've had great fun making both the castle and the house. No doubt the children especially will have great fun eating them!

Just for fun Sykes Holiday Cottages decided to try and find out how much it would cost and what you would need to build a lifesize Gingerbread House - the infographic below shows the results -a fairly reasonable £66, 037.05....I'll take 2....

I was sent my Lakeland Gingerbread Kit to take part in this challenge.

Update - We won!!! Yeeay! There were some gorgeous entries but we were chosen as the winners - thank you so much to Sykes Cottages!