Dear mummy, for the last two years you’ve made a gingerbread house using a kit that you bought from The Range. It’s from Hickler Books and it was published in 2015. It’s a fabulous kit and really easy to follow and use. Use the gingerbread recipe below to get the kids in the kitchen and create some magical memories just like we have. If you can track down the moulds even better!

We’ve had some wonderful results using this kit and together we’ve mastered the art of building a gingerbread house. It’s not often that we both have the patience to bake together but this is a fab project to bring the family together. My mummy mixes and bakes it, my daddy constructs it and I help decorate it!

You can also find this gingerbread house baking kit on Amazon and inside the box there was a book with step by step instructions that even a novice could follow. Also included was 2 silicone baking trays (one for the walls and one for the roof) and more recipes. So we got all our ingredients together, our tools of the trade and some extra special treats for decorating and set to work.

Ingredients for the gingerbread house

• 250g unsalted butter
• 200g dark muscovado sugar
• 7 tbsp golden syrup (It is a British recipe and calls for golden syrup)
• 600g plain flour
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 4 tsp ground ginger

Method

1. Heat oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Melt the butter, sugar and syrup in a pan.
2. Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and ground ginger into a large bowl, then stir
   in the butter mixture to make a stiff dough.
3. If it won’t quite come together, add a tiny splash of water.
4. Press the dough into the silicon moulds evenly.
5. Bake all the sections for 12 mins or until firm and just a little darker at the edges.
6. Leave to cool for a few mins to firm up, then trim around the templates again to
   give clean, sharp edges.
7. Leave to cool completely. We left ours over night.

 

 

For the Icing

1. 2 egg whites
2. 500g icing sugar, plus extra to dust
3. Generous selection of sweets of your choice, choose your own colour theme
4. Few edible silver balls

To decorate

1. Put the egg whites in a large bowl, sift in the icing sugar, then stir to make a thick,
   smooth icing.
2. Spoon into a piping bag with a medium nozzle.
3. Pipe generous snakes of icing along the wall edges, one by one, to join the walls together.
4. 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.
6. Dry completely, ideally overnight.
7. Enjoying decorating it with icing and sweets!

We began our construction. The moulds themselves are wonderfully detailed and the gingerbread popped right out of the silicone. We loved the roof tile details and the windows. We stuck sweets around the door and on the front of the house. To make the icicles like ours, 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.

Our gingerbread house will be edible for about a week but will last a lot longer. So what do you think, pretty nifty for a non-baker, it might even be just about Pinterest worthy!

Love Bella x

Why not Pin for later!

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