For years now, probably close to twenty, I have made a gingerbread house every Christmas. This year is no exception. This one is different from previous years: easier in some ways, harder in others.
I needed:
500 g gingerbread dough
5 boiled sweets
100 g chocolate buttons
50 g almonds
sugar by eye
You can buy icing or make it yourself. I bought white and pink icing and made some more from two egg whites and 200 g icing sugar. I used slightly too little icing sugar, so it stayed runny and flowed downwards, which gave it a style of its own…
First I made templates. Then I rolled the dough thinly directly on baking paper and cut out the pieces of the house. My baking tray is not very large, so I could bake only two pieces at a time. I cut every piece on its own sheet of baking paper. I crushed boiled sweets into the window openings, so now there was ‘glass’ in the windows rather than empty holes. In previous years I have made shutters and an open door too, but not this time. For the chimney I put the almonds on a heatproof glass surface and heated them. Mine got a little burnt, naturally 🙂 I poured sugar over them by eye and mixed it into the almonds, then spread the piping-hot mixture over baking paper in roughly the shape needed for the chimney pieces. While the almond caramel hardened, I decorated the house pieces with icing. Of course I ran short because I had bought only two tubes. Then I cut out the chimney pieces using the template, made more caramel mixture and started gluing the house together. Naturally I managed to burn a finger on the boiling-hot sugar caramel. But it cools amazingly quickly, so there was no time to daydream and these things happen. The next day I made more icing myself, and finally the house was finished.
I rolled the gingerbread dough very thinly and pricked it with a fork so it would not puff up. I used Hagari gingerbread dough and it barely rose at all, so all the edges stayed nice and straight, which is very important when assembling the house. You can put the caramel into the window openings a little after the dough goes into the oven so it does not boil. Then it might stay colourful; mine turned brown. And the roof should extend a couple of centimetres beyond the wall triangles, which looks nicer. I measured mine wrong and the roof was too small, but icing hid both the beauty flaws and the engineering errors 🙂