Gingerbread Cottage

A few days before Christmas I went to meet a good friend for coffee and a catch up. I decided before I met her I was going to buy her a gingerbread house for her and her family as a little Christmas present. I was shocked when I couldn't find one in the city center, I could find gingerbread stars in the shape of a tree, but it was no house.

A few days later I decided I was going to try and make my first gingerbread house and it has been a great success. So far I have baked the biscuits, glued them together and started decorating the cottage. I have called it a cottage because it doesn't look like much of a house. I thought I would document how I have made and decorated the cottage because it has been quite easy and I really enjoyed it. Unfortunately I decided this when I had already baked the cottage so can't document the whole process with pictures.

I used our good friend Google to find a 'simple gingerbread house recipe' and found this recipe and template courtesy of BBC Good Food. I made a few tweaks, instead of using royal icing as the glue I used boiled sugar, this was a tip from a close friend and with extra help from Google found a good blog link with really helpful pointers here. 

If I had this more planned out I would have decided on how I was going to decorate the house before actually buying the bits, but I went head first into Asda and bought all the necessary baking equipment and: a bag of large white chocolate buttons, dolly mixture, gold shine spray, micro marshmallows and white pipping icing. I have used all the bits I have used but if I had been more planned out I could have been specific with what I bought and not taken with impulse.

The baking was an easy part, as followed from here. One the biscuits had cooled I grated the edges of the biscuits to make the sides straighter. After leaving the biscuits over night I attempted to make the sugar glue, I was a little bit worried about this because of potential burns but mostly that it wouldn't stick together and I wouldn't have the cottage. But this stage went pretty well, no burns and the house is all stuck together.

This is the cottage once it had been stuck together and before decoration.

 For decoration I had decided to cut the giant white chocolate buttons in half, using a warm knife so they didn't snap without having two equal sides, and make tiles, I stuck these on using the white pipping icing. I then covered the areas which had been stuck together with the glue with the white icing, at the peek where the roof tiles met I used the gummy drops from the dolly mixture as a type of guttering. I then used the micro marshmallows to make a window and door, again using the icing as glue. To make this:

I have yet to use the gold shimmer spray, I am planning on putting that on the buttons. I am also planning to use other dolly mixture pieces for windows on the smaller sides.

It was a lot easier to make than I had thought, so I will definitely carry on experimenting maybe make a Hogwarts one day.