Building a gingerbread house is more difficult than the average person would think. Single-handedly building it and photographing the process makes it nearly impossible, but for the beloved readers of the Bonanza I would do anything. So one afternoon back in November I built a gingerbread house.
The first step was the decision to buy a kit for the gingerbread itself. I’ve never been a huge fan of pre-fabricated homes, but if you’re very busy and important this is an excellent option. They usually come with all the gingerbread pieces you need, icing mix, some candy for decoration, and a few finishing touches, like the sugary snowman that came with mine.
Clearly you’ll need a bit more candy, especially if you are building with kids — people of all ages know that no gingerbread house is complete without sugar in every shape, size, and color covering nearly every square inch. (If you don’t go all out to put the kids into a sugar coma, they’ll be bouncing off the walls all evening, right?) Another excellent decoration aid is a package of small icing tubes in a few different colors for those small details that just won’t happen with a frosted knife alone, regardless of ability or motor skills.
The first step, no matter the gingerbread’s origins, is to prepare the pieces to make sure they fit together well. Baking can sometimes change their shapes just enough to ensure that your house won’t stand. Fit them together before you make the icing, and if necessary use a knife to get the walls just right.
As far as icing goes, follow the directions on your pre-made icing mix, or if you’re ambitious, make it from scratch using the recipe on page A12. Make sure that it is stiff enough and won’t run; I learned this lesson the hard way and trust me, it’s messy. If you’re a perfectionist, it’s a good idea to ice small details like windows, doors and especially lettering, before you erect your house. Let the icing dry for a while and you won’t have drippy windows or signage that looks like the opening credits for a bad horror film.
When you’re ready, take two adjacent sides of the house and run a thin line of frosting at the joint. (I used white icing in a tube for this part because it was a little bit stiffer than the pre-made mix.) As long as you set the two walls down at a right angle, they should stand. It helps to “glue” the pieces to the plate with a little frosting at the base of the inside walls for added stability. After all four walls are up, let it dry for 30 - 120 minutes, depending on how wet the icing is.
To attach the roof, run icing over the tops of all the walls and along one long side of one roof piece. Stick the iced piece down, then the other, and make sure they meet evenly with equal width eaves on both sides. Touch up any icing that may have smeared, or use a special icing tip to make designs on the joints of your house. After the icing holding together your structure has dried, the real fun begins.
At this point, embrace that sugar-loving, wall-drawing inner child and go nuts. You have all the creative license in the world; here are a few ideas to help give you a head start.
Icing the roof is a great way to live vicariously through your project if no great amount of fresh snow has fallen recently. Different patterns or designs over the “snow” can be fun, too, like my latticework and candy decorations.
You can make a cobblestone path up to your snow-covered house using icing and jelly beans, or make stepping stones out of peppermints. Break up uncooked spaghetti strands and sprinkle them around the yard like pine needles if you love coniferous trees. The kids in the gingerbread house class at Project Mana put photographs of puppies, candles, or their families in the windows, which were complete with shutters made of wafer cookies. Hyatt gingerbread pro Guido Landoldt went so far as to suggest using a tiny sound card as a doorbell.
After you’ve decorated your walls with windows, doors, and other designs, candy, household items and the like, use some of the frosting that’s left to create drippy icicles all around the eaves of the house. Add other small details, like a toy skiier or a couple of trees to spruce up the yard. And, of course, use a little powdered sugar to fill the yard with snow--or in my case, think optimistically about the coming winter and pile it on deep.