Gingerbread House

I know Christmas has come and gone now but while we're still finishing off the Christmas Cake and the last handful of chocolates from the jar I just wanted to tell you about the Gingerbread House we made a couple of weeks ago.  I've been meaning to try one for years now and this year I finally found the time to devote to it.

I used the recipe from Rachel Allen's book, Bake as it looked so pretty.  It was pretty straightforward to put together but owners of the book should be warned that the template shown isn't correct as the roof dimensions are too small.  The link below takes you to the online version of the recipe but still, while these revised dimensions do work, next time I might add an inch to the length and width of the roof sections to give the nice overhanging effect you can see in the book.

Assembling one of these houses isn't something you can do in a hurry however if you have a bit of time to devote to it, it's pretty straightforward.  I ended up tackling it in two stages, making the gingerbread on one day and assembling it the next.  This meant I had plenty of time to spend on making, cutting out and cooking the gingerbread and it was nice and cool for the following day's construction work.

Putting the house together was easier that I was expecting as the icing held the parts together nice and firmly and didn't take too long to set.  We all then had lots of fun sticking on the different sweets and sprinkles.

All in all this was a brilliant way to spend a couple of afternoons in the run up to Christmas and both my children really enjoyed helping.  I should point out that you will end up with LOTS of gingerbread (as well as the house I also had enough for lots of gingerbread men, angels, Christmas trees etc), so you'll probably need to enlist some help when it comes to breaking it apart and eating it.

You can find the recipe here.