Making our gingerbread house 2013 (with recipe)

After our attempts in previous years of making gingerbread houses, this year we decided to take the easy route and buy the lakeland fairy tale cottage mould. And I'm soooo glad we did. This year our gingerbread house was ridiculously easy to make!

We followed the recipe on the back of the packet and it was perfect. Next year I will be making two small changes though, - 1. add a little more ginger and 2. Make 1.5 times the recipe! It was just short of fitting perfectly into the mould and we ended up not being able to make the little trees and gingerbread man that came in the mould, just the house.

For anyone that is interested (and because I will probably lose it) here is the recipe..

So once we got the shapes out of the oven we left them to cool off completely as they were still a bit malleable.

Then to stick the pieces together we used boiling sugar. We've used icing in the past and it just isn't as stable as sugar. Also the sugar dries in about 2 seconds which is handy, and goes rock solid! The gaps also look less messy than with icing sugar (not that that really matters when the kids are let loose on it afterwards anyway!)
Jakob helped mix the ingredients and put it in the oven, but for the sticking together bit we made them stay out of the room because boiling sugar is HOT!

Once we stuck it together, before we called them back in the room we laid out some coloured icing tubes and gold and silver spray. They were super excited to start decorating the house!


After they started putting the icing on we gave them some sweets and dolly mixtures to stick on the house, and icing sugar to pour over and look like snow!

This was such a fun activitiy, me and Ian joined in a bit but mainly let the boys do what they wanted and it kept them busy for absolutely ages!

Of course this kind of activity leads to lot's of messy fun :)


And that's it really! I'm hoping to do two next year, which means tripling the recipe (eek!) but hopefully it will keep them busy for even longer :D

Oh, and handy hint: if you're going to use boiling sugar like we do, don't leave it in the kitchen all day on Christmas when the cooking makes the room ridiculously hot and melts the sugar! You may end up with a caved in roof ;)