Having seen beautiful photos on the Internet, many sweet tooth and food lovers in the kitchen are wondering how to bake a gingerbread house. For the New Year or Christmas, for a child’s birthday or other family celebration, this miraculous creation of dough and sugar with the addition of a wide variety of sweets will bring many vivid impressions, indescribable delight and memories for life.
In fact, baking it is not difficult, as it might seem at first glance. It is only necessary to draw up an action plan, think over how the final result will look, and begin to act.
Step-by-step steps for baking a gingerbread house
Before you bake a gingerbread house at home, you need to draw up a step-by-step plan to make this dessert comfortable, collected and trouble-free. Here is a rough sketch:
- Prepare products for dough and glaze.
- Consider how the house will be decorated, and prepare these details.
- Choose a template for baking a gingerbread house.
- Bake as indicated in the recipe and glue the main parts.
- After fixing the base, decorate the product as you wish.
Dough recipe
In order to bake a gingerbread house, as a rule, gingerbread dough is used, from which almost every housewife bakes gingerbread men or roes for Christmas (the Slavic version of the gingerbread with painting). To prepare the dough, you will need the following ingredients:
- 350 grams of butter.
- 3 eggs, of which only yolks are used for the test, and the proteins are placed in a sealed container and sent to the refrigerator - they will be necessary in the manufacture of sugar glaze for painting the gingerbread house.
- Incomplete glass of honey.
- 100 grams of granulated sugar.
- 0.5 tsp each ground ginger, nutmeg, cardamom or anise. You can also add grated zest of one lemon or a teaspoon of cinnamon.
- 1 tsp soda quenched with vinegar.
- 900 grams of flour. The amount of this component is usually approximate, as it depends on the amount of gluten in the grain.
- 2-3 art. l cocoa powder. This is not necessary, but this product will make the walls of the house dark brown, they will contrast with the snow-white glaze - the effect will be more impressive.
How to knead gingerbread dough?
Mix honey, sugar, butter in a small saucepan and put it in a water bath, stirring constantly, making sure that the sugar crystals melt - after which the dishes are removed from the fire. In a separate bowl, mix cocoa, soda and spices, crushed in a mortar or coffee grinder. Try not to buy already ground. After all, only chopped spices are much more aromatic than those that are not known how many.
Add half a portion of the sifted flour to the spicy mixture, mix and pour in small parts to the sweet honey mass, stirring so that no lumps form. The resulting lump of dough, similar to plasticine, is wrapped in polyethylene and sent to a cold place for at least 6 hours, but better all night. It must be infused, while the spices begin to give off their aroma, and honey interact with flour.
Just before you bake the gingerbread house, we take out the dough and mix the rest of the flour with it. It should be elastic, but tight enough. Therefore, the formation is most often done on parchment paper.
Cut out the details
At home, baking a gingerbread house, as in the pictures, is difficult from scratch. Therefore, it is better to start with a simple template, so as not to be disappointed with failure. Indeed, in this matter, as in others, gradually developed skills are important.
On parchment paper we roll out the dough with a thickness of about 5 mm and, dividing it into pieces, we apply a template. We cut out the details of the house and related decorations, if they are needed according to the idea: Christmas trees, house doors, little people at the entrance, a fence, a snowman, etc.
If the dough sticks too much to the rolling pin, then you can cover it with another sheet of paper and roll it out. Then the formation process will be more relaxed. Also, before baking a gingerbread house with his own hands, the master will definitely think about what he will build the entire exposition on, so it’s worth baking a big circle for the “courtyard”. But you can use a ready-made base, for example for honey cake or pizza. But wafer cakes should not be taken - they are too soft and completely do not hold their shape.
Carefully together with the parchment we move the cut out details onto the baking sheet and bake in the oven at a temperature of 180-200 ° C for about 15 minutes. Allow the parts to cool and then carefully remove the paper. If the house is planned with windows, then you can make them from molten caramel. Pour it into the recesses on the gingerbread details immediately after removing the pan from the oven. If you do not want to cook caramel, then you can just melt a few candies.
Preparation of glaze for painting
After all the efforts and worries, when, finally, it was possible to bake a gingerbread house according to the recipe, it was time to start assembling and decorating it. For this, the same icing is usually used - icing. For its preparation, we take the remaining proteins from the refrigerator, slightly beat with a fork (not a mixer) and gradually, in small portions, add 500 grams of powdered sugar, kneading with a fork and in no case whipping with a blender. This is not a protein cream, and there should not be air bubbles in the mass.
At the end of mixing, add a teaspoon of lemon juice. Ideally, the number of components should be divided into two parts and half prepared at once - for painting the walls of the house. After all, the patterns should completely harden and strengthen before connecting the details into one structure.
How to decorate a product?
This is the most crucial moment in the preparation. After all, baking a gingerbread house is somehow easier than turning your design fantasies into reality. The first thing that is important to decide how the roof of the house will look like:
- Roof tiles. Then the simplest options are to glaze or cover the entire layer of the roof with ice and lay out nuts or small sweets, imitating a tiled roof.
- The roof of the house will be completely “snowed” with glaze and large icicles hanging on the sides. Then we leave this item for later, when the house is already assembled.
- Cover the roof with a thin layer of glaze and put out small cookies.
We also make aisles with windows, doors. If you want, you can draw patterns on the walls or paint the house "like a brick." To do this, put icing sugar in an ordinary syringe of the largest volume or make an envelope out of dense polyethylene and cut off the corner just a little. If imagination is not very good, then you can use the examples described in the article.
House assembly recommendations
When all the painted parts have hardened, then you can assemble the entire structure together: on the base layer we mark the places where the house will be located, and where additional decorations, if any. If the structure is small, then all of its sides can be immediately assembled together by gluing them with ice. If the size is more than 30 centimeters, then it is better to assemble in two opposite parts, immediately gluing the walls, and after hardening - the roof. It is important not to rush and give the glaze time for complete hardening, so that the whole gingerbread house thoroughly holds. When it is installed on the base, it is better to additionally support the walls with wooden toothpicks, and when the aising dries up - carefully remove them. After that, the final touches on design follow: imitation of icicles, snowdrifts near a house or snow on a Christmas tree, a fence.
What else can decorate the gingerbread house:
- small sweets: candy, jelly or M & M;
- decorations made of chocolate: melt chocolate and use a syringe to draw any forms on parchment paper, from simple snowflakes and stars to ornate fir trees and birds.
- candied berries also look good as a decoration.
Video workshop
If you still do not understand the description of the process of how to bake a gingerbread house, a master class from a real professional may help more.
Carefully follow the directions and persistently try several times, if suddenly it does not work out the way you want. After all, as you know, Moscow was not immediately built.