Homemade Gingerbread House

A gingerbread house that tastes great! This recipe uses egg and molasses sugar. Great for making gingerbread men too! Merry Christmas to All!

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Makes 1 gingerbread house or approximately 2 dozen gingerbread men. Total time is not inclusive of the dough-chilling and cookie-cooling time.

You can strike through ingredients, as you prep them, by clicking on the ingredient.

Ingredients:

Royal Icing for gingerbread house:

Method:

1. Sift the flour, soda, salt and ground spices into a bowl.
2. In a separate bowl, beat together the regular sugar and shortening, till fluffy.
3. Add the egg (At room temperature) and continue to beat till pale yellow in colour.
4. Add the Molasses sugar and continue till blended well. Stop beating at this point.
5. Add the sifted ingredients. Fold in with a spatula and then switch to dough attachments of your mixer. Add milk and beat till the ingredients begin to hold together. Stop beating. We don’t want to overwork this dough.
6. Now, with your hands, start to knead (adding a little flour or milk as needed, to get the dough so that it is neither sticky nor too dry). Knead JUST till you get a smooth ball. Add a dab of shorting and rub all over the surface of this ball of dough. Flatten slightly.
7. Wrap with cling-wrap and place in the fridge to chill for 1 hour.
8. Remove from fridge and place the flattened disk of dough between two sheets of parchment.
9. Preheat oven to 375 ºF / 190 ºC.
10. Roll out the chilled but pliable dough into 1/4 inch thickness.
11. Using Gingerbread house cutters to cut out 2 each of the sidewalls, roof and front and back walls.
12. Roll out the remaining scrap dough together and cut again, till it all used up.
13. Place on a baking tray lined with cookie sheet/wax paper.
14. Bake on the second rack from the bottom of the oven for 10 minutes.
15. Remove tray from the oven. Leave cookies in baking tray on the countertop for 10 minutes.
16. Then, transfer to a wire rack to cool off completely. The cookies harden only once out of the oven.
17. Once completely cooled, decorate with the royal icing.
18. Use a cake board or large platter as the base. Use a good amount of royal icing to attach front-back and side walls to the floor as well as together. Use icing especially on the inner corners. Then attach the roof. Use appropriately sized cups to hold up the walls below the roof till it sets.
19. Decorate the roof and walls after the structure has set. Attach the decorative candy while the icing is still moist. Leave to set.

Royal Icing for gingerbread house:

1. Using a stand mixer, beat the icing sugar and meringue powder (covered on low speed).
2. Add vanilla extract and a Tbsp of water at a time till moistened.
3. Increase speed and beat till stiff enough to decorate. You can add liquid to loosen and icing sugar to thicken as required. Keep it covered till time to decorate.
4. I find using squeezy bottles or piping tools helps a lot to decorate (as opposed to using piping bags).

Homemade Gingerbread House

Notes:

• Mix up the spice! Common spices used in gingerbread are ginger, cinnamon, cloves and allspice. Mace or nutmeg are also sometimes added. In my recipe I use equal amounts of ginger and cinnamon, You can increase the proportion of ginger: cinnamon if you want the ginger spice to be more prominent. Taste the dough as you go to get the spice mix to your liking.
• Icing notes! Royal icing keeps in the fridge up to 3 weeks and can be beaten again to suit your requirements. It acts as a glue also to build the house and attach gummies and candy.
• Decorate! I decorated my gingerbread house, with royal icing, candy, gumdrops, candy cane and colourful sprinkles.  Be creative… it can be so much fun! It’s not about perfection here.  Get everyone to help with the decoration. It’s so much better that way and creates memories.

Key Ingredients: Flour, Sugar, Baking Soda, Golden Syrup, Spice, Vanilla extract, Royal Icing (Meringue powder and icing sugar).

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