How To Build a Gingerbread House!
Gingerbread houses are not built in a day, especially if you go the from-scratch route! You can get the kits – prefab gingerbread houses – that are available at Target, Amazon and Williams-Sonoma, to name a few. But if you want the crafty construction pleasure of making the dough, cutting the pattern pieces, baking, assembling, and decorating — here are a few imaginative ideas for walls, roofs, frosting and candy!
The Joy of Gingerbread Baking
Using the recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes, you’ll need lots of flour (six cups) and plenty of butter and brown sugar, plus ginger, cloves and cinnamon. Elise says to refrigerate the dough for at least two hours and preferably overnight. You can actually make the dough three days ahead of time for your gingerbread house raising. And we’ve found that gurus of gingerbread advise waiting a few days for the build — to give the pieces time to harden.
The Food Network’s recipe is similar, but it must be for a much smaller house. Maybe a gingerbread apartment or doghouse. ☺ And they don’t offer any patterns, just a go-by photo with a nice bumped out front door.
For some pattern pieces, you can find 20 free templates at Best Gingerbread Houses. Of course there’s a whole website devoted to gingerbread houses, right?! You’ll find a Victorian house, a Classic house, and templates for a gingerbread train, a church, Noah’s Ark, and even trees.
The New York Times cooking section published an entire guide to making a gingerbread house. The recipe from former White House pastry chef Bill Yosses, is pretty delicious – if you plan on eating the house. And apparently you can eat Yosses’ house, well into the New Year! But as the instructions indicate (and there’s a video to help you along) – you’ll want to make two batches of his recipe because one batch will be too much for your mixer!
The Royal Icing recipe at The Spruce Eats, is the perfect cement to secure your walls and roof pieces, and you’ll see how shredded coconut doubles as snow. And if you’re up for making an entire mini-gingerbread village, The Spruce Eats suggests a kit you can get from Wilton.com. Otherwise, between now and Christmas – you might run out of time!
Gingerbread House-Making Parties
Watching the how-to video from Taste of Home is fascinating. They make it look soooo easy! Cutting out walls and roofs with a cardboard pattern and a pizza wheel, and using frosting for glue. The chef-artists here created a candy cane window, textured the roof with things like pecans and breakfast cereal and created a few gingerbread people to live in the house. Doors and windows can be wafer cookies, Oreos, pretzels, candy canes, or licorice ropes.
Here’s a slew of fun gingerbread house decorating ideas, and some of the candy you’ll need to recreate them. Raspberri Cupcakes offers up a Christmas craft challenge with a gingerbread igloo, and Taste of Home offers up their version of a gingerbread farm!
You’ll want to set the mood with some holiday tunes, and pass around some warm Christmas wassail while you and your crew build, taste and croon!
Holiday Celebrations at Colliers Hill
The family-friendly master-planned community of Colliers Hill hosts holiday events of at the Overlook community center, and is close to the town of Erie’s holiday happenings, too. Join the home buyers who’ve settled in this fast-growing North Denver development. Explore the amenities and tour the model homes offered by Meritage Homes, Richmond American Homes, and Century Communities. Floor plans include ranch-style or two-story designs — priced from the high $300s.
