Gingerbread Houses are beautiful to look at and good enough to eat. The baking, building and decorating not only provides good family fun and encourages togetherness, but lets you use your imagination and creativity. A gingerbread House can be as simple or elaborate as you wish. The simplest house can be dressed up to look elegant and a dignified Victorian Mansion can be simply decorated.
The making of Gingerbread goes back many centuries to medieval England, but the baking, building and decorating of Gingerbread Houses for Christmas can be traced back to Germany. Fortunately the tradition has spread throughout much of the world. The early English colonists in New England and the German settlers in Pennsylvania brought their family recipes with them and continued the tradition in the New World. Even though the Gingerbread house is usually decorated for Christmas, with Christmas candies, they can also be decorated for other holidays such as Chanukah. For a Chanukah house, use blue and white candies (M & M's are sold in custom colors at Party City or on-line. White chocolate coated pretzels and gold wrapped chocolate coins for a roof can also be used.
Wilton Cookie Sheet
If you have never built a Gingerbread House it would be good to take a class to make your first one or purchase a kit that contains all the house parts and decorations. Making your own is by far the superior way to go, however not everyone has the time and it does take a little bit of instruction to make it work.
When you do decide to bake and build your own house, be sure to allow plenty of time to avoid mishaps and frustration. A good rule to follow would be to bake the house parts one day, and then construct it and decorate the next day. Even better would be to decorate it on a third day, giving the house construction plenty of time to dry before adding the weight of the decorations.
Equipment that you will need to bake a house is of course mixing equipment, flat cookie sheets, a rolling pin, a pizza cutter and a small knife along with cookie cutters if you want people or animals around your house. You can design your own house or find patterns on-line. Wilton even makes a set of cutters to make a small house with. You will find that there are several recipes available for making Gingerbread Houses but the best and strongest are the ones in which the liquid ingredients are heated before being mixed with the flour mixture.
It is best to roll the dough out directly on a baking sheet and then cut the pieces as closely together as possible so they do not expand during baking. You want to bake them long enough so that the dough is completely baked through, but not so long that the pieces will burn. Usually 15 minutes at 350 degrees will do it. When your Gingerbread House pieces come out of the oven, loosen them from the pan, but do not remove them until they have completely cooled. Also, if there are doors and windows to be cut, this needs to be done while the pieces are still warm and soft. Once they have cooled sufficiently, transfer them to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before constructing the house.
The frosting that is used to build and decorate a Gingerbread House is Royal Frosting which is made from Egg Whites and Powdered Sugar or Meringue Powder (dried egg whites), Powdered Sugar and Water. The frosting is ideally made with an electric mixer and is beaten until the frosting is stiff enough to hold up the pieces of the house. Ideally, when you lift up the blades of the beater, the frosting will not run off, but rather will just sit there on the beater blades.
Be sure to build your house on a sturdy board, such as a carving board or a piece of scrap plywood, large enough to hold the house and strong enough to hold the weight. A good size for the board would be 18 x 24, but of course this will also depend on the size of the house.
All in all, building a Gingerbread House can be great family fun; you should not worry about how beautiful the house will be but think about how much fun you and your children will have together on this project. An added benefit is that you are creating a tradition that be recreated every year and also building memories for you and your children. Enjoy this moment in time! For photos and other hints about Gingerbread Houses go to sylveeeskitchen.com