How to prepare a gingerbread house for Christmas and New Years? Detailed step by step recipe, chef secrets and video recipes.
The gingerbread house is a bright and tasty decoration for a festive New Year's table. Its creation in many families is a real pleasant tradition, because it is a creative process that takes a long time. A ready-made gingerbread house, like any other Christmas pastry, ripens before Christmas, creates a pre-holiday mood and pleases households with beauty. If you have never dared to bake it, please yourself and your loved ones on New Year's holidays. This review offers delicious recipes and interesting house templates.
How to make a gingerbread house: all the stages of preparation
The process of creating a gingerbread house can be divided into 4 stages: kneading the dough, preparing the templates, baking and assembling the house. Let's consider each stage separately.
The first stage is kneading the dough
You can make dough for the house according to your favorite recipe. It can be honey, ginger, chocolate, custard and other gingerbread. Below are the most popular gingerbread dough recipes.
Option 1. Honey-spicy dough
- Caloric content per 100 g - 497 kcal.
- Servings Per Container - 1 House
- Cooking time - 1 day to create a gingerbread house
Ingredients:
- Flour - 1 kg
- Ground cardamom - 0.25 tsp
- Eggs - 3 pcs.
- Ground allspice - 0.25 tsp
- Ground ginger - 0.25 tsp
- Butter - 20 g
- Honey - 250 g
- Ground cloves - 0.25 tsp
- Sugar - 200 g
- Ground cinnamon - 0.25 tsp
- Soda - 0.5 tsp
Cooking honey-spicy dough:
- Combine flour with baking soda and ground spices.
- Knead the dough until it is elastic.
- Shape the dough into a ball, wrap in plastic and refrigerate for 2 hours.
Option 2. Choux honey dough
Ingredients:
- Flour - 3 tbsp.
- Honey - 4 tablespoons
- Sugar - 100 g
- Butter - 50 g
- Eggs - 2 pcs.
- Soda - 1 tsp
- Cognac - 2 tablespoons
- Water - 50 ml
- Spices (cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, ginger, nutmeg) - 1 tsp
Cooking choux honey dough:
- Add honey, sugar, oil to the water and heat all the ingredients. At the same time, make sure that the mixture does not boil.
- Add spices with flour to the mass, remove from heat and quickly knead the choux pastry without lumps.
- Cool the dough to room temperature, add eggs and knead until smooth.
- Roll the dough into a ball, wrap with cling film and refrigerate for 1 hour.
Option 3. Ginger dough
Ingredients:
- Flour - 700 g
- Butter - 220 g
- Sugar - 250 g
- Eggs - 2 pcs.
- Honey - 400 g
- Soda - 1 tsp
- Ground ginger - 8 tsp
- Baking powder - 1 tsp
Gingerbread dough preparation:
- In a bowl, stir in the butter and sugar and add eggs one at a time.
- Whisk the food until smooth, pour in the honey and stir.
- In another container, combine dry ingredients: flour, ginger, baking powder, and baking soda.
- Combine all the masses and knead the dough, wrap it in plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator for 2 hours.
The second step is preparing templates
You will need a ruler, pencil and paper to make templates. Here you can show your imagination and draw all the details of a house with windows, doors, shutters, chimney, roof. Then cut everything out.
Also, a ready-made template can be downloaded from the Internet and printed. Do not forget to prepare templates for forest animals, trees, a fence and a base on which the entire composition will be assembled. The more details there are, the more interesting it will turn out, but it will also be more difficult to fix everything on the surface.
Below are examples of templates for a house
The third stage is baking
Roll out the dough and immediately place on a baking sheet. The optimum seam thickness is 5 mm. Transfer all templates to the dough, cut out the details of the house with a knife and remove the dough scraps. On the cut out parts with a knife, apply a pattern imitating notches, bricks, tiles, foliage on trees …
Bake the blanks in the usual way, as you bake cookies or gingerbread, at 180 ° C for 10-15 minutes until golden brown. Leave the finished gingerbread blanks to soak for a day.
Fourth stage - collection
The next day, start assembling the composition. Before that, inspect the joints of the parts. If necessary, cut a little with a knife. Because the dough in the oven may blur a little and the parts will lose their size. If this happens, it is better to immediately cut off all excess according to the pattern, while the gingerbread cookies are hot and soft.
Then, using a pastry syringe or a bag with a cut corner, decorate each detail separately. Draw windows, snowflakes, tiles, walls, roofs, and other small drawings. It is inconvenient to do this on a finished house. Let the pattern grab and only then glue the details.
To assemble the house, gently grease the joints of the parts with sweet protein, connect them and support them with improvised means. Leave to dry. You can build a house on a gingerbread base or on something inedible: a flat plate, tray, box. Fix the assembled composition and leave for 12 hours so that everything sticks together and does not creep.
How to glue the house together?
- Protein glaze. For 1 egg white is 200 g of powdered sugar and 1 tsp. lemon juice. To do this, beat the protein with juice, gradually adding the powder, and beat everything until a white airy mass.
- Chocolate. Melt the chocolate in a water bath, without boiling, and fasten the house with a thick layer.
- Caramel glue. From 100 g of sugar, 2 tbsp. water and a few drops of lemon juice, boil the caramel until it begins to solidify.
- Toffee glue. 100 g sugar and 2 tbsp. sour cream, cook until the toffee begins to stretch.
How to decorate the house?
To decorate a gingerbread house, protein glaze is most often used in its own form or tinted with food dyes. You can also decorate the house with dragees, almonds, small candies, marmalade, marshmallows, marshmallows, chocolate drops, crunchy grain pillows, oatmeal powder, decorations for Easter cake, etc. Make icicles from whipped protein or caramel. Place a garland in the house, and the composition will look magical! The gingerbread house is stored for a month, this will only make it tastier, and the gingerbread will increase in volume and become soft.
