Gingerbread for Houses

melting pot's Note:

Okay, I got this off a chef who didn't give any baking or heat directions, so I've posted what worked for me - which it did, but it might have been a freak accident... And note, this makes HEAPS so I actually halved it, which required, er, half an egg which was difficult to attain, I think I used 80% of the egg since it was hard to stop the whole egg from jumping in. Any suggestions? It came out really well though, because I added in some extra cinnamon and nutmeg to balance out the extra liquid.

• Total Time: 1 hrs
• Prep Time: 25 mins
• Cook Time: 35 mins

Ingredients:

Yield: 4 miniatu ...

• 400 g butter or 400 g margarine
• 300 g brown sugar
• 200 ml golden syrup
• 1 egg
• 35 g ginger
• 10 g mixed spice
• 12 g baking powder
• 5 g bicarbonate of soda
• add extra cinnamon (optional) or nutmeg (optional) or cloves, to taste (optional) or ginger , etc to taste (optional)

Royal Icing

• 2 egg whites
• 1 ½ cups sifted icing sugar
• 1 drop lemon juice

Directions:

1. Gingerbread: Mix butter, sugar, golden syrup together in a bowl until well mixed.
2. Add egg gradually, then add dry ingredients and mix well.
3. Refrigerate for at least 1/2 hours.
4. Preheat oven to 160°C.
5. Line 4 baking trays with baking paper. Place 1/4 of mixture onto lined baking tray and roll out to 1cm thickness. You should fill up the whole tray, but if not, that's okay, just reduce baking times by about 5-10 minutes.
6. Repeat with remaining mixture and trays.
7. Bake for 35 minutes.
8. Cool to room temperature for a couple of hours, preferably overnight.
9. Icing: Using an electric mixer, place the egg whites and lemon juice in a bowl and gradually add mixing sugar while beating on high until it reaches a thick consistency. Remember you will be piping it and it has to be thick enough no to drip. Add more icing sugar if it's too thin. Stop adding icing sugar if it's too thick.
10. Cover with plastic wrap while assembling gingerbread house. Use it like glue - edible, delicious glue.
11. Decorate with chocolate buttons (Smarties preferably, but M & Ms are acceptable too :D), gum drops, hundreds and thousands etc -- Let your imagination go free!

Reviews

[kiwidutch]

I didn't make these into an actual house, but rather rolled the dough into squares the size of my baking trays and decorated these, one for DD's bus driver, one for her teachers and one for DS's creche staff. I also had spare dough left over and made some gingerbread men and women. The taste was great, but by far the biggest complication of this recipe is that the ingredient Flour is missing, Guessing, I added 600g and it was too sticky, then upped it by 100g each time to 800g when it suddenly got too dry, so probably somewhere between 700 and 750g would have been closer to the mark. I liked that it had golden syrup in it and not molasses but the flour problem meant that it was more of a hassle to make. Still, we got there in the end. It's not the easiest dough to roll, but again probably my Flour guess wasn't quite on the button and that WOULD have made a big difference. I hope to see this recipe updated because I Zmailed the chef, and delayed making the review but there has been no reply. A good tasting gingerbread, which I hear delighted the recipients. It would have gained 4 stars if the missing ingredient had been corrected. Thanks. Note: review dropped to 2 stars because I wanted to make these 1 year after my first review and the amount of flour still hasn't been added. Sorry, but despite the great taste I don't want the hassle of guessing again, therefore won't be making these again.

[Rae England]

I don't think I'll be making this but I wanted to say *WOW*. Beautiful!