Saturday, December 26, 2009

Daring bakers build a gingerbread house!

This month I actually had time to have a go at the challenge twice! I foolishly offered to make a gingerbread house for one of my colleagues, so I decided I definitely needed a trial run to make sure I was up to the challenge!

I tried using anna's recipe and it worked very well, I think the first time I rolled it out it was a little thick, so there were cracks in the gingerbread as it cooled. I also needed to bake twice, the first time it was a little bit soft, so I put it back in the oven until it was harder and more sturdy.

On the second attempt, I decided to follow martha stewarts recipe, and unfortunately I measured the roof wrong, so I had to make some extra pieces to make it large enough. I think it came out pretty well for my first attempts at gingerbread houses, although I'm not sure this is really something I'll be becoming an expert at! We'll see how I feel next year when I'm ready to tackle it again!

It does make a lovely christmas decoration though, since ours are a bit sparse, it was nice to have something festive in the house. I found it really great that any mistakes can be covered up with copious amounts of candy and icing!

One thing I did find useful was to re-cut the gingerbread when its still warm out of the oven, I found it did spread a little.


I added a couple of sugar-cone trees which were piped with royal icing with a leaf tip.

The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.

5 comments:

anna said...

Your trees are so cute! And I love the houses. You are an awesome decorator!!!

SweetThingsTO said...

Very nice houses!

Johnny said...

Gorgeously done! They look fantastic.

silverrock said...

Wow! your gingerbread house looks fantastic! Way to go on this month's challenge, you rocked it! Can't wait to see what treats you bake up in the New Year :)

Y said...

Seriously, what cute cute houses! :)