Make your own gingerbread house recipe

making gingerbread house

by Emily Gilbert |
Updated on

It may not be the easiest (or quickest!) thing to do but making your own gingerbread house is one of those festive activities that the whole family can get involved in, whether it's making the gingerbread itself, building the house or of course the most fun part in our opinion - decorating!

This recipe from the BBC also includes a forest of gingerbread trees if you're feeling fancy and can be tweaked to suit whatever design you fancy or more importantly, whatever sweets you prefer.

Ingredients

For the gingerbread:

250g unsalted butter

200g dark muscovado sugar

7 tbsp golden syrup

600g plain flour

2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

4 tsp ground ginger

To decorate:

200g flaked almonds

2 egg whites

500g icing sugar, plus extra to dust

125g mini chocolate fingers

generous selection of sweets of your choice, choose your own colour theme

1 mini chocolate roll or a dipped chocolate flake

few edible silver balls

Makes: 1 house with 12 portions | Prep: 2 hrs | Cook: 30 mins

Method

  1. Heat the oven to 200C/180C fan/gas 6. Melt the butter, sugar and syrup in a pan. Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and ground ginger into a large bowl, then stir in the butter mixture to make a stiff dough. If it won’t quite come together, add a tiny splash of water.

  2. Cut out the template (download it here). Put a sheet of baking paper on a work surface and roll about one quarter of the dough to the thickness of two £1 coins. Cut out one of the sections, then slide the gingerbread, still on its baking paper, onto a baking sheet. Repeat with remaining dough, re-rolling the trimmings, until you have two side walls, a front and back wall and two roof panels. Any leftover dough can be cut into Christmas trees, if you like.

  3. Pick out the most intact flaked almonds and gently poke them into the roof sections, pointy-end first, to look like roof tiles. Bake all the sections for 12 mins or until firm and just a little darker at the edges. Leave to cool for a few minutes to firm up, then trim around the templates again to give clean, sharp edges. Leave to cool completely.

  4. Put the egg whites in a large bowl, sift in the icing sugar, then stir to make a thick, smooth icing. Spoon into a piping bag with a medium nozzle. Pipe generous snakes of icing along the wall edges, one by one, to join the walls together. Use a small bowl to support the walls from the inside, then allow to dry, ideally for a few hours.

  5. Once dry, remove the supports and fix the roof panels on. The angle is steep so you may need to hold these on firmly for a few mins until the icing starts to dry. Dry completely, ideally overnight. To decorate, pipe a little icing along the length of 20 mini chocolate fingers and stick these lengthways onto the side walls of the house. Use three, upright, for the door.

  6. Using the icing, stick sweets around the door and on the front of the house. To make the icicles, start with the nozzle at a 90-degree angle to the roof and squeeze out a pea-sized blob of icing. Keeping the pressure on, pull the nozzle down and then off – the icing will pull away, leaving a pointy trail. Repeat all around the front of the house. Cut the chocolate mini roll or dipped Flake on an angle, then fix with icing to make a chimney. Pipe a little icing around the top.

  7. If you’ve made gingerbread trees, decorate these now, too, topping each with a silver ball, if using. Dust the roof with icing sugar for a snowy effect. Lay a winding path of sweets, and fix gingerbread trees around and about using blobs of icing.

Your gingerbread house will be edible for about a week.

Ready made gingerbread house kits

If you don't want to go through the fuss of making the gingebread yourself, try one of these kits instead...

Gallery

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Bakedin - Ginger Bread House Baking Kit

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