So as promised, today’s post is about our first Gingerbread House in the The Flavor Bender household, and how we decorated it, along with the gingerbread house recipe and template! We have already decided that this is going to be a holiday tradition for us that we can build some fun memories around in the years to come! 🙂
Updated: December 2017
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I first made this gingerbread house in 2014. We wanted to make one every year, but honestly we didn’t have the patience between making gingerbread cookies and waiting for the house to be decorated. It was easier to bake the gingerbread cookies, ice them and then just stuff our faces with ’em! Still, there’s something exciting and quintessentially Christmassy about decorating gingerbread houses with kids and all the people you love! 🙂
I’ve also realized that if I were to make a gingerbread house for a crowd, I may have to make TWO. One for the others to decorate, and the second just for me. My inner control freak will not let me rest otherwise. 🙂
The recipe I first made for gingerbread was from Sweetapolita, but since then I have changed my recipe considerably to suit my own tastes. This took lots of recipe testing but it was worth it because it’s perfect for me now! Plus I also to make sure that I have enough to make the entire house PLUS extra dough to make small cut out cookies too. Plus the scraps you end up with can also be baked and turned into these delicious gingerbread bourbon cookie truffles too!
So here goes. This is my workflow for making gingerbread houses.
Day one – Make the gingerbread dough in the morning. Roll and bake the gingerbread in the evening. (You can split this into two days too).
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Day two – Make the royal icing “cement”. Stick the gingerbread walls and roof together. You will have to stick just two walls together first, and follow that with each section every hour or so. I used drinking glasses and boxes to keep the walls straight, until the “cement” dries up.
I colored a portion of the royal icing in different colors and frosted the cookie cut outs as well. This includes any Christmas trees, gingerbread men/women, gingerbread snowmen etc. These were left to dry up overnight as well.
Day three – This is the fun part! You get to decorate the gingerbread house however you like! If you placed the gingerbread house on a tray, you can decorate the whole landscape, or you can just decorate the house. Get more royal icing, candy and chocolate ready to decorate the house.
You can still check out how I decorated the gingerbread house I made in 2014, at the bottom of this post (after the recipe).
For the new gingerbread house that I made this time, I opted to go with minimal colors. You can definitely have multiple colors of royal icing, but I kept it mostly white (and I left out the chimney from the 2014 version of my gingerbread house too).
I used 3D royal icing to pipe windowsill “baskets” and filled them with sprinkles. I piped 3D flower beds for the front of the house, and filled them with sprinkles too (can you tell that I love sprinkles?).
For the roof, I created scalloped royal icing patterns that I brushed (like for royal icing brush embroidery). The icing sugar that was brushed on top creates the look of light snow fall too, which I think is a beautiful touch.
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I decorated the outside of the house with white royal icing, and made these adorable 3D gingerbread cookies using the set here.
And of course our house wouldn’t be complete without the gingerbread versions of K and I right? 🙂
THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE TEMPLATE
Here’s the template that I used for the gingerbread house from pickyourownchristmastree.org.
The templates were printed on A4 sheets. The A4 sheets were glued onto cardboard and then cut out using a craft knife (or a pair of scissors).
You can change the shape and positions of the windows and doors however you like!
ROYAL ICING RECIPE
The royal icing recipe I used is included in this gingerbread house recipe below. I used TWO batches of the royal icing for this entire gingerbread house. I used the recipe just as is for the “cement”. But I mixed in a little water to thin it out as needed for decorating the cookie cut outs. Make sure to add only a little water at a time when you do this.
These are the details of the gingerbread house that I decorated the first time around in 2014 –
My husband suggested Christmas lights, so we piped colorful lights all along the edges of the roof.
I even piped a Christmas wreath on the front door of our gingerbread house.
So what lessons did I learn from my first gingerbread house?
- Patience young grasshopper, patience! Especially when it comes to decorating the cookies with royal icing. I also need more practice in terms of flooding the cookies with icing and spreading it out to make it look neater.
- You need quite a bit of confectioner’s sugar on hand and a few mixing bowls (I used my coffee mugs) to mix in colours.
- Buy extra candies, but stay away from anything cherry flavoured. I had forgotten how much I hate artificial cherry flavoured life savers. They taste too much like cough syrup. More gummy snakes and MnMs please!
- I might use a thicker base board next time. Mostly because it was harder to move the gingerbread house around for pictures later on.
Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Recipe
