How to make a Gingerbread House: My school’s Food Tech way!

Tehe, Just in time for Christmas! I share with you, how to make a Gingerbread house similar to the one I made in Food Tech at school almost two weeks ago! The recipe given to us was definitely not their own, but anyway, I plan to share with you, how to make a Gingerbread House: My school’s Food Tech way! Who ever knew a Gingerbread house recipe would be so long!

Ingredients:
190g softened butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup treacle
1.5 eggs
3.75 cups of plain flour
1.5 tablespoons of ground ginger
1.5 teaspoons mixed spice
1.5 teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda

Method:
Beat butter and brown sugar with an electric mixer until creamy and pale. Add in the 1.5 eggs and treacle while beating. Remove the beaters. Sift the dry ingredients together and sift into the butter mixture. (By now, you should have made a rather powdery mess and you should have been having trouble getting the treacle out of the cup) Combine by hand on a floured surface. (Try finding a not very well washed, recently used for something probably unhygienic large chopping board) When kneaded to a nice dark colour, and feels like a good cookie dough, wrap in cling wrap, write your name on it, and store it in the fridge for about a week.

Take out of refrigerator and knead the dough on a cleaner, floured, board until soft again. You can do the following step in two ways, the normal way, or Ethan’s way. To do it the normal way, roll out the dough on baking paper until it’s around yea thick (6mm according to our recipe). To do it Ethan’s way, just smash the dough down with your fist until you think that it’s close to the right thickness (maybe a 5 cm leeway?) and continue the normal way. Cut shapes of the walls and roof from given templates (12x8cm, 15x11cm and 12x15cm (7cm high triangle on the top) and some various other small bits and pieces you may want. You will need about 2 of each minimum. (You can choose to have 7 walls, 1 roof piece and borrow the other roof piece off someone else if you want) Then, to cook your dough, preheat in a reasonably new electric fan forced oven at 170 degrees Celsius. Keep your pieces on the baking paper, place onto tray, and slide into oven for about 20-25 minutes. To pass this time, try throwing some measuring cups into a drawer. Once done, take out of oven, taking care to drop one of your walls back into the oven in an almost impossible to reach spot. Leave the cooked gingerbread to cool for 5 minutes, then wrap in plastic bags, and store in pantry for another week.

To “cement” the gingerbread house, I suggest you use a large piece of silver cardboard as a base, like we did, because silver is shiny! To make the cement, combine 2 egg whites and 500 grams of sifted icing sugar until very thick. Then grab your pieces and cement the edges of your walls to connect each of them and to connect to the cardboard. Ask around if anyone has a spare roof piece, take one, say thank you to the person who gave it to you, then cement on your roof. Leave to sit in some cupboard where it is likely that cockroaches and other insects may crawl over your house but you don’t know that they do and so you can only wonder for a few days.

If you want a house like mine, then it’s not decoration time yet. Make sure that one of your walls has collapsed inwards in a way so that you can’t fix it unless you take off the roof. Take off the roof, take out the wall, use one of your spare walls and cement to fix up the wall, and ask around again, to see if anyone has a spare roof. Rectify your roof, by cementing the one you managed to get from a person with a lot of spare roofs. Store in that cupboard where you are unsure if insects crawl about or not for a couple of more days. If you want a house like Ethan’s, ask for help from your Food Tech teacher to help reconstruct your just collapsed house.

Decoration time! Buy some lollies! Now, if again you want a house like mine, make some royal icing by using the same ingredients as the cement, although use a little less icing sugar or until you have a nice and lighter style “cement” although is able to be piped via a piping bag. I brought along some Candy Canes and a lot of Home Brand junk; “Choc Buttons”, “Fruit Jubes”, “Fruit Flavoured Sticks” and “Jersey Caramels”. Place your icing into a mouldy smelling piping bag and have trouble piping the icing out because the nozzle doesn’t fit on properly or because the piping bag doesn’t like you. Eat about 80% of your lollies and other people’s lollies while you try and find a piping bag that works. Once you find one that works, then stick your lollies on using your piping bag, stealing other people’s lollies at the same time. Decorating may take a few weeks depending on how often you have Food Tech in a week. And if you want an Ethan style house, just let you fellow Food Tech members add some decoration to your house! The image below demonstrates how the two style of houses differ:

Once you are happy with the decorating you have done, it’s wrapping up time! Dust your house with icing sugar and then wrap it up using wrapping cellophane that is only just big enough. Steal a few last minute lollies and other sugar and then Ta Da! You’re gingerbread house is ready for poking by other people! To get the complete package, if you plan on giving it to someone as a gift, once nicely wrapped, smash it! The person who you’re giving it to will be glad they don’t have to spend their on time trying to dismantle the house so that you can eat it. On your way home, don’t forget to drop your house so that the cement fails to keep your house stable!

And there you have it! A Gingerbread house recipe just in time for Christmas! Especially if you don’t have that much time on your hands! (The house on the right is one that Martin made. Which was a lot neater and simpler than ours.