Daring Bakers Challenge: Gingerbread House

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

I was really looking forward to this challenge. I had made a gingerbread house last Christmas, well actually a gingerbread shed for the guys at Owens work, and I was planning on making one as a gift to my lovely friends Claire and Nathan who hosted Christmas Day this year, complete with a silly amount of lollies. So I made that one with the help of my 7yr old and was rather larger than I was intending and it ended up very wonky! Lucky I had extra dough leftovers to make a more sophisicated and understated house. I didn't see the point in making a dough that was thick and sturdy enough to last a long time but didn't taste good, so I stuck to the recipe I used last year and worked really well for me. It was from the Littlies magazine. Its nice and firm but has a beautiful flavour and rolls out well with a generous helping of flour.

Here's the first one:

Fantastic for kids - my kids were so gutted not to be on the receiving end of this house!

And here's my proper teeny weeny cute one:


Instead of using a whole bunch of lollies I used a few leftover pineapple lollies I made myself and put them on top. Otherwise its just royal icing and a few gold sugar pearls.
I made my own template and found that with the help of some glasses I could assemble it pretty easily. Both houses were tricky as the weather is so hot, and the royal icing just melts and slides around terribly, but it does harden up eventually, so keeping the glasses to hold it together as long as possible is the best.


I loved this challenge!