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
gingerbrea
d 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.
