Gingerbread house

It was snowing heavily today, windy and very cold.  It was the perfect weather outdoors to be indoors, as Pete would say.  So we stayed nice and warm indoors.  Having lots of time today, we decided to work on a project - build a gingerbread house. 

The gingerbread house is also a typical Christmas decoration here.  Many stores here sell boxes of ready made walls and roof made of gingerbread dough, all neatly flat-packed ala Ikea (minus the L-key, of course).  All you need to do is make the icing and caramel to assemble the pieces and decorate it.

some of  the pieces inside the box

We bought one a few weeks ago and decided to assemble it today.  When we opened the box, we found that some of the pieces had cracked but it wasn't bad enough to make assembly impossible.  We started by melting some sugar to make caramel.  We dipped the edges of the walls and held them together.  It was easy to stick the walls together since the melted sugar harden quite quickly but working with caramel is really messy.  We got melted sugar everywhere.  The spoons that we used were also coated with the hardened sugar.

Luckily Pete has some experience with it.  He had made those when he was young.  He even helped to clean up the pan which we used to melt the sugar.  The remaining caramel hardened at the bottom of the pan and looked impossible to clean.  But he managed to clean the whole hardened mess by adding lots of water into the pan and heating it up until all the sugar dissolved.

While he was cleaning the pan, I made the icing by whipping up one egg white till fluffy and adding icing sugar to it.  It was quite easy to do and didn't take too long.  The problem was only that I didn't have an icing bag.  I had to make do with a freezer bag which wasn't flat like a ziplock bag.  There were folds at the corners and I had to be very careful to cut the tip of just one of the folded corners.

Because of that, it was not easy to do the piping but I tried as best I could.  I used the white icing to cover as much of the hardened caramel that dripped down the walls and off the corners.  I also used the icing to stick some colourful chocolate buttons.  It was fun to do, especially when Pete put the whole thing on our Lazy Susan.  It worked like a turn-table and it made piping work much easier.

Pete's work

my work - the decoration

I really enjoyed piping the lines and decorating the house.  It's a pity the makeshift piping bag wasn't that good.  Next time I would use greaseproof paper to make the bag instead.  And I do plan to make another one next time.  The stores also sell templates for walls and roofs.  It would be quite easy to make one from scratch.  For those who don't want to make the dough, there are also frozen, ready-made gingerbread dough too.

I also loved the recipe for the icing.  It was easy to make and flowed easily.  I would make different coloured icing next time too.  I already know what my next project is going to be - gingerbread men.  If it works out, I will post the recipes too.