It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

This week it started to feel like Christmas really is just round the corner. Not only did our tree and decorations go up in the house at the weekend but also while I indulged in my first Starbucks Gingerbread Latte of the year I received my first Christmas card from my friend Libby, at work. All this, teamed up with my first attempt at baking and making a Gingerbread House, it’s no wonder I’m feeling festive.

So onto the actual making of the Gingerbread House. I was visiting my friend Bev over the weekend who it quite a good baker so we decided to tackle this task together. I found a recipe on the BBC Good Food website for a “Simple Gingerbread House” and decided that “simple” was probably what we needed as neither of us had attempted gingerbread before, let alone a whole gingerbread house. This is the recipe that we used for the dough;

250g unsalted butter

200g dark muscovado sugar

7 tbsp. golden syrup

600g plain flour

2 tsp. bicarbonate of soda

4 tsp. ground ginger

Firstly, we began by adding the sugar, butter and golden syrup into a medium sized pan and melting this all down. The butter takes a while to melt, so ensure you stir it constantly so nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan and burns. We also sliced the butter up into small chunks so it melted a bit quicker. Next we combined the remaining ingredients into a large mixing bowl (flour, ginger & bicarbonate of soda) and once the butter mix was fully melted we added this slowly to create a beautifully smelling dough. Next was the fun part where we had to roll out the dough and cut it into shapes. We had printed off and cut out the templates from the BBC Good Food website (found here) and after one template got stuck to the dough, we made sure to flour the others...whoops! The important part to this is to make sure the dough is thick enough, we tried to keep it no thinner than the thickness of two £1 coins and don’t worry you will have plenty of dough if you stick to that thickness.

We split the baking into three as it meant we could bake some while we were cutting the next shapes and this worked out great. We put each tray of dough in the oven for 12 minutes which was just the right time for all three bakes. We did almost have a disaster when one of the roof pieces nearly split right down the middle and this was because we forgot how soft the gingerbread still is when you first pull it out of the oven, so just be careful with this. After the gingerbread had all been baked, they needed trimming again because they expand quite a bit; allow the pieces to cool a little first though otherwise you will burn your fingers. Once trimmed, allow to fully cool and harden up. After about half an hour we decided to attempt the build but first we had to make the icing. We simply added 2 egg whites to 500g icing sugar to ensure our icing would dry rock solid and keep the house stable. We plastered the icing on as at this stage as we weren’t too worried about how it looked, we just wanted it to stick together. Side note, we had left over icing even after we decorated the house, so don’t be shy when you use it to build the house. Once we had pieced all of the house together, we left it to dry for about an hour before we started decorating it. We used items to hold up each roof panel as they are quite heavy and we were worried they might slide down (see photo).

To decorate we used Cadbury’s Mini Chocolate Fingers for the walls, half a Penguin Yule Log (similar to a Cadbury’s Mini Roll) for the chimney and a selection of sweets and toppings for the rest of the house. Check out the end result and although it did take us a few hours from start to finish, it was fun and it really wasn’t too difficult so go on, give it a go!

This was a picture of the Gingerbread House less than 24 hours after we completed it as I took it into work with me…people loved it :)

With all this indulging in Christmas goodies, next week’s blog will be on the gym and how to get yourself back into it!