Anyone ever make a Gingerbread house?
Every year at a local art gallery, gingerbread houses made by professionals & kids are on display. All are auctioned or donated to hospitals. Amazing to think of the time committment & patience to make one of these structures! Have you ever attempted making a gingerbread house? Describe how it looked, what candies you selected for decorations & what you did with it in the end...eat it?
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8 Comments:
I have made several simple ones and it is a lot of fun. One rather large one -- my first -- was a raffle prize. It was taken to a day care center. And I have made them with my nieces and nephews on several occasions. I have stuck with simple 4-walls and a roof construction.
When making houses with kids, I like to make the parts ahead of time. Younger kids tend not to have the patience needed to roll, cut, bake and cool all the parts. The assembled house needs to dry a little while too before you can decorate it. If you have a stash of cookies too you can decorate those while waiting on the house.
For roofs, nothing beats Necco wafers! All chocolate looks sort of like slate, but the colored ones look, well, gingerbready! Mini-shredded wheats looks a lot like thatch roof.
Tootsie rolls make a good looking pile of logs. Gum drops, jelly beans, red hots, drages, peppermints (the swirly ones), almost any small hard candy looks good. If you can find them, jelly beans that look like pebbles are fun for chimneys; slice in half -- it's less heavy. M&M's work too. Setting up the candies in muffin tins helps keep things tidier.
If you want to make a little fancier exterior, you can roll fondant in a pasta maker and cut it in strips, like siding or make shutters. Gelatin sheets make good looking windows. Or you can use crushed hard candies and bake it in, like stained glass cookies.
We have never actually eaten one -- they always got taken home But the scraps were good!
kjgibson at 8:35PM on 12/02/07
I've made at least a dozen gingerbread houses. I've cemented walls together using royal icing and even by using pure melted sugar (not recommended for the danger it presents to you and your skin!). I've built stretches of fencing using mini gingerbread men holding hands. I've planted forests of edible pine trees on the south 40 by using inverted ice cream cones and carefully cut pieces of "gummy" type mint leaf candies. Stacked pretzels turn into firewood. Licorice and long strips chewing gum layed end to end form circular driveways and roads. Hard square shaped chewing gum pieces make excellent "ceramic tiles" that frame windows and doors. I've hand cut pieces of gingerbread dough to form water fountains, lamp posts, flights of stairs, mailboxes, holly hedges, ballrooms, churches, and one train station. I always made sure that every single component of the house (except the wooden base it was built on) was edible. However, I usually amped up the amounts of ginger and cinnamon in the dwellings to produce a nice scent. That amounted to a dough that wasn't terribly pleasant to eat.
My last structure was dubbed, "The Aaron Spelling Gingerbread House" by a friend of mine due to its impossible size and scale. It had an east and west wing and stretched roughly four and one half feet in length by two and a half feet deep. It was extremely heavy and wasn't moved once it was completed. They are TONS of fun to make if you have the patience. I'd love the chance to do another one, but I don't have the free days and hours required to finish the job.
Acme Instant Food at 10:44PM on 12/02/07
I've made a fair amount of gingerbread houses, but my favorite house i made freshman year with one of my friends in the dorms. It was out of graham crackers, but we made Buckingham Palace with little gummy bear guards. It was fantastic!
lola27 at 10:57PM on 12/02/07
You guys are amazing!! I'm planning to make one with the grandkids this year. Is there a website for a pattern & good recipe or do you devise your own?
JEP at 5:26AM on 12/03/07
I made one for an art project last year - a gingerbread "mini mall", complete with chocolate-covered parking lot, marzipan cars and people, and royal-icing windows and signs. i actually used caramelized sugar to glue the walls together instead of royal icing. It was a bit dangerous/painful at times, but it worked wonderfully.
emmab at 7:29AM on 12/03/07
When my children were small, we used a pint milk container for the base, covered with graham crackers (royal icing for glue) and various cookies and candies for decoration. They had fun, but I can assure you Aaron Spelling would not have even visited, nor would Tori have shopped!
I never attempted the real thing - you guys truly are amazing. Santa hat off to you.
PerkyMac at 7:40AM on 12/03/07
JEP -- there are lots of recipes online, probably patterns too. Here is Gale Gand's recipe with pattern instructions included.
kjgibson at 11:49AM on 12/03/07
kjgibson and others:
How do you embed a website in a color highlighted word?
PerkyMac at 2:38PM on 12/03/07