EntranceGingerbread house new year. How to make a gingerbread house for Christmas
On the eve of the New Year and Christmas - it's time for the festive magic - the gingerbread house!
- 40g chilled aquafaba (chickpeas)
- 180 g powdered sugar
- 20 g cornstarch
Additionally:
- zip bag or confectionery syringe with a thin nozzle
- tassel
- roof tape
- a piece of foil for windows
Package:
- cardboard
- polypropylene film
- ribbon
How to make a gingerbread house with your own hands - a master class with step by step photos:
- Prepare the ingredients you will need to make the dough:
- Cooking dough. First you need to melt the sugar. To do this, pour it into a deep bowl, best of all from stainless steel, since enamelware may leave scratches. Put the dishes with sugar on a fire slightly less than medium. Stir from time to time, it is better to use a long-handled spoon for this, if you have one.
The sugar will begin to turn into yellow lumps. When sugar is half liquid, reduce heat to low. As a result, it should completely melt and drain from a spoon in a thin stream. If sugar is stirred too rarely or overexposed on fire, then it may overheat, foam will appear on top - in this case, when adding tea, it may begin to “spit”.
- While the sugar is melting, you need to brew tea, add the jam and stir until the jam dissolves. Before adding jam tea to sugar, you should weigh it again, as hot tea evaporates quickly, you may need to add a little water to it.
Jam tea
- In melted sugar, without removing from heat, add tea little by little, at first literally a teaspoonful, then gradually increasing the portion, stirring intensively after each topping up. The sugar will sizzle and sizzle. This process cannot be photographed, as there is a lot of steam and the lens fogs up.
- When all the tea is mixed in, increase the heat to high and bring the syrup to a boil. Then immediately remove from heat and put the dishes with syrup in cold water so that the syrup cools quickly and does not evaporate. Cool to a barely warm or cold temperature, then add oil and honey (I have flower in one spoon, buckwheat in the other), stir so that the honey dissolves.
Syrup of sugar, tea, butter and honey
- In a separate bowl, mix the sifted flour and spices. Pour the syrup filtered through a sieve there (we filter in case there are undissolved pieces of sugar, honey or jam). Mix part of the flour with the liquid. Soda to repay the lemon juice and add to the dough.
Knead the dough with a spoon, then knead with your hands for about 10 minutes. If you are making a double portion of dough for a gingerbread house, then you need to knead for 20 minutes. If the dough is poorly kneaded, then the gingerbread cookies may bubble during baking, the surface will be uneven. The dough will turn out to be very viscous, sticky - you don’t need to add flour, it should be so.
Kneading lean dough
- Fold the finished dough into a plastic container, tightly close the lid and refrigerate at least overnight. If the dough is not infused enough, then the gingerbread cookies can again turn out to be uneven.
In an airtight container in the refrigerator, the dough can be stored for quite a long time, albeit for a whole month, and at any time you can get it and bake it.
- To make a template for a gingerbread house, you need to print it on A4 sheet - ordinary office paper will do (click on the photo to enlarge). If it is not possible to print, then you can draw according to the given dimensions, then cut it out.
This lean gingerbread house turns out to be small. And if you make it larger, then you will need to build some spacers from bamboo sticks to strengthen it, since this dough is too soft for large houses - their walls can bend or break under their own weight.
- Remove the dough from the refrigerator, cut off a third or half (depending on the size of your rolling mat). Cover the rest of the dough and refrigerate.
- Press a piece of dough with your hand to make a flat layer, and sprinkle well with flour on all sides.
- Roll out to a thickness of 5 mm, adding flour if necessary, so that the dough does not stick to either the rug or the rolling pin.
Roll
- Attach paper templates to the test and cut out the blanks of the house. The stand and the lower part of the roof can be cut with a wavy knife. In the walls, first cut through the windows, then the outline. You need to cut carefully, not with a too sharp knife, so as not to damage the rolling mat.
Cut out blanks
- Transfer the cut pieces to a baking sheet (I needed two baking sheets to fit all the parts). In the upper part of the roof details, make holes with a straw (you can do this immediately after baking, while the gingerbread is still hot - then the holes will be larger and the ribbon will be easier to thread).
For baking, you can use a baking sheet with ungreased parchment or a baking sheet with a silicone mat sprinkled with flour. I like to bake on a baking sheet with a silicone mat and Teflon parchment on top, then the bottom surface of the gingerbread is smooth, but on regular parchment it turns out slightly wavy, as the parchment wrinkles during baking.
You need to bake gingerbread at a temperature of 160 degrees for 10 minutes. Readiness can be checked by gently patting (without pressing) with your fingertip on the surface of the gingerbread - it should be plump, not wrinkled. Gingerbread cookies should not brown, and their bottom surface should not become hard - if this happens, reduce the baking time.
- After nothing can be cut out of the rolled out layer of dough, you need to collect the scraps, knead, roll out the resulting piece of dough again and cut out more details. After that, collect the scraps again and knead. This last piece of dough has already gained a lot of flour during the two rolls, so you can’t use it for the details of the house - they may turn out to be too thick or crooked. You can’t put it in the refrigerator either - it will harden too much, then it will be very difficult to roll it out.
Best of this piece make little gingerbread. Then they can be put inside the house, or they can be folded into small glass jars tied with a ribbon, it will turn out very beautifully. Small gingerbread cookies, after they have cooled, should be immediately folded into a plastic container, jar or bag and sealed tightly so that they do not dry out.
- While the details of the vegan gingerbread house are being baked, let's take care of the windows. You can leave them empty, or you can make marmalade windows. Pectin marmalade or dense apple jam cut 5 mm thick, then cut 5 squares from this layer in size, like windows in a paper template. You can cut it by eye, not necessarily the exact exact size. Put the squares on pieces of foil like this:
Cut out marmalade
- Spread freshly baked hot parts directly from the baking sheet, as if stringing windows on marmalade, slightly pressing on the edges of the windows. The marmalade will melt from the hot gingerbread, exactly take the shape of a window and stick. It is not necessary to remove the foil yet, we will remove it during the assembly of the house.
Here are all the necessary details:
Finished house details
- While the parts are cooling, you need make a frosting. The primer is needed so that the glaze adheres to the parts covered with glaze, and the parts not covered with glaze do not deform. Large gingerbread cookies, after lying down for several hours, begin to bend - the edges are bent up. To avoid this, they need to be covered with a primer. In addition, primed gingerbreads acquire a beautiful brown color and chocolate flavor.
From the amount of ingredients indicated in the recipe, a little more than 100 g of primer is obtained. For a gingerbread house, you need very little of it, so most of it will remain. It can be stored in the freezer in a small, closed jar or glass, defrosting the jar as needed. warm water and mixing well. Can be used not only for gingerbread, but also to cover cupcakes, sweet pies, etc.
So, mix powdered sugar, starch and cocoa. Add half of the water, stir, then add a little more water and stir until you get a thick mass. Continue stirring until no lumps remain. Pour in the rest of the water, stir.
The icing should be quite liquid, draining from a spoon in a thin stream. If you do not have accurate scales, then you can measure the ingredients for the primer with teaspoons: 0.5 tsp. cocoa, 2 tsp starch, 6 tsp. powdered sugar. Add water little by little until you get the desired consistency.
Pour the finished primer into a jar or glass and cover.
- As the cookies cool down, they will thicken a little. Then the sidewalls of the walls and the upper edge of the roof will need to be cut a little with a fine grater at an angle of 45 degrees, so that they fit together well during assembly.
We comb the edges at 45 degrees
- Cover the details of the gingerbread house with a primer with a brush. Any synthetic brush from an office supply store will do, just wash it well with soap and water. It is necessary to primer as thinly as possible, smearing as much as possible over the surface.
The side and bottom ends of the walls also need to be primed, since glaze will be applied to these parts when assembling the house. The back of the gingerbread does not need to be primed. When the primer dries, stops shining (this happens pretty quickly), you can start painting the gingerbread.
- we will produce Glaze will need to be divided into two parts - for the contour and for pouring. Add powdered sugar to the icing for the contour until such a consistency is obtained that the icing does not drain from the spoon, but slowly slides and falls in a clot. In the icing for pouring a little, add water a few drops and stir until the icing begins to slowly drain from the spoon in a thick stream.
- To draw a contour, you can use a special confectionery syringe with a thin nozzle, or you can put the icing in a zip bag with a clasp, cut off a tiny corner and draw by squeezing the icing out of the bag.
Before pouring the background, it is better to circle the gingerbread along the contour, so that later you get neat edges. Filling is convenient to do with a soft brush. Circle the windows not close to the marmalade so that the icing does not get wet.
Applying frosting to details
- When the fill surface seizes, stops shining, you can apply patterns over the fill, only carefully, since it has not yet hardened inside and can be washed out. We paint a gingerbread house, as fantasy tells, you can involve children in this activity - it will be good entertainment for New Year's morning. Then let it dry for a few hours.
- When the parts are dry, you can start collect a house. If it is made for a gift or for long-term storage, then you need to make a box for it. In other cases, you can simply collect on some flat dish or tray.
The box is made of cardboard, with low sides, a little larger than the size of the coaster, at the bottom it is better to make several layers of cardboard so that it does not sag (if the cardboard is laminated, like mine, you need to wipe the box with alcohol, and if some other cardboard, then lay it out it inside with parchment or napkins).
- Put the baked coaster in a box or on a tray (when the gingerbread house is assembled, it cannot be taken by the coaster and lifted, so it should be immediately put in its place). Take two adjacent walls, apply glaze on the bottom end of both walls and on one side end of one of the walls.
- Glue the walls to the stand, while gluing with each other. Hold them for a minute in such a position that the icing grabs.
Installing on a stand
- Take another wall, apply glaze to the bottom and one side end. Glue to the stand and to one of the walls.
- On the last wall, apply glaze to the bottom end and both side ends. Stick to the stand and walls.
Installing the remaining walls
- Grease the corners of the house with glaze.
- Attach the details of the roof to each other at an angle and lace up with a ribbon, tie a bow.
- Remove the foil from the windows, put small gingerbread cookies inside the house (you can also put sweets or a small gift). Apply glaze to the top of the walls.
- Carefully place the roof on top, making sure that it lies symmetrically. Gingerbread house without eggs, cooked with your own hands, ready!
Gingerbread house
Now you can wrap it in a transparent polypropylene film (such a film is sold in florist shops, flowers are also wrapped in it) and tie it beautifully with a ribbon. Or you can just cover it well with a plastic bag so that it does not get stale.
Don't leave the gingerbread house uncovered for several days or it may become tough. In extreme cases, if it has become stale, then it can be revived by leaving it wrapped in a bag with apple peel overnight - gingerbreads absorb moisture from the air well.
Enjoy your meal! Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!
The tradition of making gingerbread houses began in Germany in 1812. Then the fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm "Hansel and Gretel" was published. Readers really liked the appetizing gingerbread house that lost children came across. That is why its analogues soon became an invariable attribute of Christmas and New Year's fairs.
The beauty of this festive treat is that, thanks to the spices, it can be stored for several weeks. And it is the spices that give it a special New Year's flavor.
Ground ginger and cinnamon are essential ingredients. But other seasonings can also be used. For example, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver sometimes adds a little nutmeg and ground cloves.
Although the dough is stored for a long time, nevertheless, over time, the house will begin to get stale, so you should not delay the tasting too much. Moreover, it will be quite difficult to resist.
Ingredients
- 220 g butter;
- 250 g sugar;
- 2 large eggs;
- 400 g of liquid honey;
- 700 g flour;
- 1 teaspoon of soda;
- ½ teaspoon baking powder;
- 4 teaspoons ground ginger;
- 4 teaspoons ground cinnamon;
- 1 ½ teaspoons salt.
Cooking
In one bowl, mix butter and sugar. Then add the eggs one at a time and beat until smooth. Pour in honey and mix well.
In another bowl, combine all dry ingredients and transfer the mixture to the first bowl. Knead the dough, wrap it in cling film and refrigerate for a couple of hours.
Shutterfly.com
This amount of dough is enough for an average house 20 × 10 × 20 cm.
How to build a gingerbread house
This is the most difficult, but at the same time the most interesting part. It is best to build and decorate a house together with loved ones. So you will have a great opportunity to spend time together and develop creative abilities.
First you need to make a house template. You can draw it yourself or choose from ready-made ones. For example, download , or .
Roll out the dough into a large layer 0.5-0.7 cm thick, put templates on it and cut out the necessary details. It is best to roll out the dough between two sheets of parchment. So it won't really stick to anything.
shutterfly.com At this stage, if desired, you can cut out additional windows and a door in the dough. And from the leftovers, you can make Christmas trees “growing” next to the house, build a chimney or bake.
Carefully transfer the parchment with the details to a baking sheet and place in an oven preheated to 180 ° C for 12-15 minutes. The dough is baked if it has hardened and turned dark brown around the edges. Allow the parts to cool before building the house.
At this time, prepare the protein glaze: it is needed to hold the walls and roof together and for decoration. Beat 3 egg whites with a mixer until foamy. Then, without stopping beating, gradually add 500 g of powdered sugar to the proteins. You should get thick white icing uniform consistency.
Prepare a beautiful stand on which the gingerbread house will stand. After gluing, it can no longer be transferred.
Then, using the glaze, glue the pieces to the stand and to each other. The easiest way to do this is to place the icing in a pastry bag, piping bag, or regular plastic bag with a small hole in the corner. When building a house, the walls need to be supported with some improvised means so that they stand evenly.
The rest of the frosting will come in handy for decorating.
Details can be decorated even before you put them together. Especially if you decide to build a large or custom house. But if you make it according to the patterns presented above, you can decorate the finished product.
Pie - belly friend
GINGERBREAD HOUSE. Part 1 - all the secrets of mastery.
Hello dear hostesses. Today we will bake a gingerbread house. From the very beginning to the victorious end. The article is big. But this is because I told all the secrets and nuances. I laid straws wherever a novice cook could fall.
I set myself a goal warn you against all possible mistakes in advance so that you get a wonderful gingerbread house the first time.
You will know all the tricks and all the tricks. I will offer you a choice several ways to glue a gingerbread house and you will choose the one that seems most convenient for you.
And if you still have any questions, then ask them in the comments to this article.
I'll give you time right away., so that you know , how many hours will the whole process of making a gingerbread house take.
- Dough kneading 20 min + time to keep it in the fridge for 1 hour
- house drawing on cardboard 20 minutes (can also be done ahead of time)
- Rolling out dough and cutting details gingerbread house 10 min
- Baking 15 minutes
- Preparation of glaze for gluing and decorating(while the house is baking the same 15 minutes)
- decoration details cream and cooking tinsel 10-30 min (depends on you)
- Building a gingerbread house(20-30 min), with assistants faster (or slower).
- Drying the house(10 min if my way)
- Roof installation(20-40 minutes, if you also use toothpicks, you will quickly fix it)
- Decorating a gingerbread house sweets, cream, laying edible tiles on the house (from 30 minutes to infinity, because there is no limit to perfection).
The minimum is 3 hours. without breaks for rest and on the condition that the dough has already lain in the refrigerator for the time allotted to it.
Many hostesses make a gingerbread house not in one day, but in stages:
- 1 day - dough and baking walls for gingerbread house
- 2 day - gingerbread house glue
- Day 3 - decoration, decorating a gingerbread house
If you want the process to be a little faster, you can make a simplified version of the gingerbread house in the form of a gingerbread hut.
Or make a house from ready-made purchased cakes(by the way, there are cakes specifically for gingerbread houses with windows already cut out), or from chocolate bars, or from large biscuits(photo below).
Step 1. Cooking the dough
200 g butter(mash with a fork or chop with a knife)
5 spoons of liquid honey(if honey is candied, heat in a water bath, or on very low heat, stirring constantly)
200 g sugar
1 sachet of baking powder
4 egg yolks(!!! before separating the yolks from the whites, read the instructions below)
4 cups flour(this is approximate, depending on the size of the eggs)
Salt and Spices to choose from, 1 tsp each.: ground ginger, cinnamon, zest of 1 lemon, cardamom, anise
ATTENTION!!! Instructions for the correct separation of proteins from yolks
We will need the proteins from these eggs for gluing and decorating the house. We will beat them with powdered sugar. To protein cream turned out as it should, follow the following rules:
1. We break the eggs with clean and DRY hands, and the proteins should also flop into the DRY dishes. One drop of water - and everything is in the dark.
2. Not a single particle of the yolk should get into the whites - otherwise the cream will not foam (separate the protein from each egg over a separate dry bowl and, if it is separated without an admixture of yolk, pour from the bowl into a bowl with other proteins).
3. Since we will beat the cream later, when we put the walls of the house to bake, put the dishes with proteins much higher so as not to accidentally splash water into it.
So, from the above ingredients, knead the dough, wrap it in a film and put it in the refrigerator for an hour or two. Let it lie there, and we go to cut out the template of our future house from paper.
Step 2. Cut out the template from cardboard
If you are not sure about your own architectural or culinary skills, then you can make a simplified design of a gingerbread house - a kind of gingerbread hut (see photo above). As you can see in the photo, such a gingerbread house has no side walls, only triangular facades and a roof. A very convenient option for those who prefer a simpler design.
You choose the dimensions of the gingerbread house yourself - for the above amount of test the height of the facade of your house should be equal in size to your palm. The main thing is that the parts fit together in size with each other. How this will be achieved, I depicted in the diagram below using the example of a drawing of a simple gingerbread house.
As you can see, the parts match in size as follows:
The side wall must be the same height as the side of the front (value b)
And the slope of the roof is the same length as the side (value b) and the same height as the upper line of the slope at the front part (value a), the height of the slope can be made larger so that the roof hangs in the form of a canopy.
Step 3. Roll out the dough and cut out the details
chilled dough lay out on parchment or paper and roll out with a rolling pin. Be sure to lay the parchment, it is needed in order to transfer our cut-out details of the house to the baking sheet on it. If you carry parts in your hands, they can stretch, deform, and then, when assembling the house, they will not match each other in size.
The thickness of the dough layer should be at least 0.5 cm.
The figure below shows one trick to roll out the dough to an even thickness. On the sides of the dough, before rolling out, we put 2 slats with a height of 0.5 cm we need and roll out the dough, rolling our rolling pin along these slats (a foam profile from a hardware store is ideal as a slat, a 2-meter profile costs half a dollar).
For rolled out dough put a cardboard template and cut it out with a knife,very convenient to cut with the pizza wheel. You can immediately cut out windows on the raw dough, or later on the baked parts (see photo below). From the remnants of the dough, we cut out figurines of Christmas trees, animals, a pipe, a porch, a fence - what the fantasy tells, and what the dough is enough for.
Right on the parchment where we rolled out, and transfer the figures to a baking sheet, cutting off a piece of parchment with a detail with scissors (photo below, on the left).
The baking tray must be level, otherwise the house can also turn out with curved walls (and try to dock them later).
We bake the details of the gingerbread house at a temperature of about 200-220 gr. FROM(on medium heat) about 10-12 minutes. We take it out of the oven as soon as the cakes are already yellow, but not yet brown (photo above, on the right). While the cakes are hot, it is easy to cut windows out of them if you want.
But it’s better not to overdo it for the first time, because you can simply draw windows on the walls of the house with protein cream, as here:
And when you bake your next gingerbread house, you can not only cut out windows, but also “Glaze” with marmalade or caramel.
Step 4. Making frosting for decoration and gluing
Ingredients : for 1 protein, 200 gr. powdered sugar + 1 tsp. lemon juice (or a little bit of vinegar, or dry lemon acid). Acid is needed not only for taste, thanks to it, the glaze is more elastic, tight, sticky.
If you don't have powdered sugar , don't worry, I'll tell you a secret, I personally always make the same icing with regular sugar. The main thing here is that sugar should be fine-crystalline, so to speak, fine grinding (this is often found on sale), such sugar has time to melt in the protein during whipping. And in order for it to melt for sure (even coarse-grained), even before whipping, you can simply let it lie down in a slightly whipped protein, it will melt during this time, and the cream after whipping with sugar will also turn out as it should. Beat the protein gradually adding sugar with a tablespoon until the foam becomes stiff and stagnant, as in the photo below. And you can make your own powdered sugar, tar sugar on a coffee grinder.
In the photo below, I made and photographed 2 types of glaze in the first bowl of sugar, in the second bowl of powdered sugar - there is no difference in stickiness, moreover, sugar is much more palatable, and even cheaper. Therefore, I personally choose icing sugar- and you can try both and decide for yourself which one you prefer.
Process:
Beat the whites first without anything into the foam, then gradually add the powder by a tablespoon, without stopping whipping. As soon as the cream becomes tight and holds its shape, it is ready, even if you have not poured out all the powder. Eggs also come in different sizes. For small eggs, as much powder as in the recipe is not necessary.
If desired frosting can be tinted by adding cocoa, or food coloring.
ATTENTION, dyes for Easter eggs, are only suitable if they do not contain salt, or the packaging has the inscription “Can be used for confectionery". You don't need salty frosting.
Because glaze has the ability to harden quickly, then it is better to cover it with a damp (not wet) towel after cooking. And while you are messing with the cakes, the icing will harden, but if you work quickly (in the spirit of Yulia Vysotskaya), then you don’t need a towel, the icing will not harden in half an hour.
Better yet, cook first one serving of glaze from 2 egg whites(for decorating the walls of the house), and then a second batch of frosting(for gluing parts of the house). That will make more sense.
Step 5 Decorate the Walls
Even before gluing the gingerbread house, we paint the walls and roof.
Schedule conveniently with pastry syringe or pastry bag. But if you don't have either, then read the following note:
How to make your own pastry bag in 1 minute.
We take a regular stationery file (or a clean, dense plastic bag), cut off (straight or obliquely) the bottom corner to make a tiny hole, load a portion of the cream into the file and twist the top of the file with a roller (like a carpet) and fix it with a stapler in several places (if not in stapler house, paper clips will do or you can sew with a needle and thread). Done - you can extrude patterns.
We draw windows, decorate with small sweets, multi-colored confectionery topping, almonds, glue patterns cut from ordinary marmalade.
On one of the walls you can depict a Christmas tree. Draw with white cream and stick with sweets, like toys, or lay out a Christmas tree using the mosaic technique of triangular marmalades.
The roof can also be decorated before assembly, but it is more convenient for me to decorate the roof already on the gingerbread house itself. I posted a lot of ideas for decorating the house in a special article , there you will also find many photos of different gingerbread houses.
Step 6. Choose a base
Immediately decide what your gingerbread house will stand on. It can be another dough cake, an elegant dish, a tray, a cutting board, a box of sweets. Once you glue the house, you will not be able to transfer it to another dish. You will only move it along with the base on which you will glue it.
It is undesirable to choose dishes made of plastic. Because when you want your house, glued with a protein cream, to harden in 10 minutes in a warm oven (and not in 3-4 hours in a room), you cannot do this, since plastic releases toxins when heated, and this is of course not necessary.
Take the cakes and, without gluing, join them on this base, see if the house fits on a dish, if the details fit together. If there are uneven slanted walls somewhere, now it's time to trim them with a knife.
Step 7. Choose how to glue the house
1. Protein glaze
See the egg white frosting recipe above. Glaze for gluing parts is conveniently applied using a pastry bag or a bag (how to make a bag yourself in 1 minute, read a little higher), or just with a spoon.
If the icing does not stick well to the cake lightly dampen the bonding area with water using a brush. Glaze can be applied simultaneously to both parts in the places of their gluing, and then pressed against each other. Hold for a while with your hands, and then just support the walls with improvised jars. And so, together with jars, and send to dry.
To make the gingerbread house glue set faster, I do this: I heat the empty oven to a hot, but not hot, state. I TURN OFF THE OVEN (that is, the fire does not burn in the oven !!!) and in this heated environment I place my gingerbread house for 2-10 minutes. The time depends on the "degree of heat" of the oven. Periodically I open and check with my finger. When our protein cream begins to turn into marshmallows (you will feel this by touch, or the cream may look slightly browned around the edges) - carefully remove it. Your gingerbread house is held together with a strong zifred cream.
2. Melted chocolate
MELTING CHOCOLATE (melt the tiles in a steam bath, such chocolate glue hardens quickly, and the house does not need to be additionally held after gluing.
3. Caramel glue
CARAMEL GLUE : 100 gr. sugar + 2 tbsp. water + a little bit of citric acid.
Acid is needed in order to prevent the "saccharification" of caramel. Those who have cooked caramel know that sometimes it does not crystallize into a candy, but is all candied into a fragile crumb. But citric acid will not allow this.
You cook sugar with water in the stage of light bubbling, stirring constantly, until a drop of such a syrup begins to crystallize on a cold saucer, that is, harden into caramel.
4. Toffee glue
WITH TOFFEE GLUE: 100 gr. sugar and 2 tbsp. boil sour cream in the boiling stage, stirring continuously, until a drop of such syrup, dropped into a glass of cold water, will land on the bottom of this glass in the form of soft and stretching toffee to the touch.
In this toffee glue, when cooking, you can add a spoonful of cocoa - you get chocolate toffee.
You need to glue the details of the house with hot glues, until the glue is cold. That is, either act very quickly, or keep the pot of syrup in a hot water bath (that is, a small pot with hot sweet glue is immersed in a larger pot with water boiling in it).
Gluing with caramel, toffee or chocolate looks something like this.
Keep the remaining caramel in a boiling water bath so that it does not freeze. It will come in handy as an excellent glue for laying tiles on the roof of a gingerbread house. And if you want to glaze windows with such caramel, read this article.
Step 8. Making the tiles
Now glue the roof in the same way. This connection must be as strong as possible so that the halves of the roof do not move out of the house.
Some fasten the roof by sticking skewers or toothpicks in the place where the roof joins the front facade of the house.
I just generously apply protein glaze to the upper edges of the walls of the gingerbread house and as soon as the 2 halves of the roof are fitted, I immediately apply a thick layer of sticky cream along the entire roof ridge (top of the roof). The glued roof can be supported on both sides with suitable size jars until the glue is completely cured. .
When the roof is glued, you can lay tiles:
The tiles can simply be painted with protein glaze, laid out with almonds, chocolate bars, crispy pads, gummies, or whatever. Tiles can be glued for white frosting or caramel glue. You will read more about the types of sweet tiles and how to lay them in our next article - there you will also learn many more tricks for decorating a gingerbread house.
I will be glad to see questions, wishes and photos of baked gingerbread houses in the comments to this article.
The gingerbread house is one of the most unusual Christmas treats. There are many ways to bake and decorate this sweet souvenir. Below is a classic recipe.
Mankind has been familiar with ginger for about 3 thousand years. This spice, originally from the East, was also known in Russia. AT Soviet time they stopped importing it, so our compatriots perceive ginger as a curiosity.
Useful properties - medicinal and gastronomic. The root has a spicy burning taste. Widespread use in cooking different types: fresh, dried, marinated). It is added to salads, soups, snacks, decoctions and infusions for weight loss. In the Eastern countries they are candied, in England they make liqueurs.
- Baking with a pleasant aroma becomes a symbol of the holidays: Easter, Christmas;
- Thanks to the medicinal content homemade baking well stored, does not deteriorate for a long time;
- Desserts with ginger improve digestibility, prevent weight gain.
To please your family, to create a real fairy tale for the holiday, you can make a gingerbread house with your own hands.
traditional recipe
For creating delicious dessert no special cooking skills required. You need ordinary products, basic skills in working with dough, diagrams in order to correctly determine the size of the house. The most important thing is to have desire and free time.
Cooking the dough
- Flour - 500 gr;
- Powdered sugar - 100 gr;
- Liquid honey - 100 gr;
- Butter - 150 gr;
- Baking powder - 3 gr;
- Eggs - 2 pcs;
- A mixture of spices: cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, ginger - 1 teaspoon;
- 1 spoon of cognac (optional);
- Yellow marmalade.
Glaze
- Powder-130;
- Lemon juice - 5-6 drops;
- White of 1 egg.
Cooking
Mix all spices, add butter, eggs, powder, honey. Sift flour, put baking powder in it, mix thoroughly. Combine all ingredients in one bowl, knead the dough. Wrap an elastic elastic ball of dough in a film and put in the cold for 3-5 hours (you can leave it overnight).
Read also: Properties, composition and preparation ginger tea with thyme
Take out the gingerbread dough an hour before starting work so that it warms up a little. At this time, it is necessary to prepare the details of the future house that need to be baked:
- Front wall with doorway;
- Back wall (same in size, only openings do not need to be made);
- Door;
- Two side walls with window openings;
- Shutters -4 pcs.;
- Window sill -2 pcs.;
- The chimney consists of three parts, different in shape;
- Two identical roof parts;
- The lower part of the house is in the shape of a square.
When the dough has warmed up, it needs to be kneaded again and rolled out on parchment sheets, half a centimeter thick. Place rolled sheets on baking sheets. Lay out the cut out details of the house on top. Carefully cut out all the details for the gingerbread house, remove the remaining dough. With the help of improvised materials, imitate tiles on the roof.
If you evenly line the walls, the house will look like a wooden one.
Bake the pieces for 10 minutes until they turn golden and be careful not to burn. After baking, the "building materials" need to cool and lie down for 4-5 hours. Straws are inserted into the window frames, pieces of marmalade are squeezed between the straw sticks.
Glaze
Let's prepare the frosting. Beat the powder, lemon juice and protein with a whisk intensively for 7-8 minutes. It should shine and leave a mark on the surface. Then you need to cover it, put it in the refrigerator for half an hour. For painting use a pastry bag.
The next stage is painting, and then assembling the entire structure. Another option is to paint the assembled house.
The house can be installed on a large flat dish or tray covered with a napkin. Connect the walls by smearing the joints with glaze. You can also glue the parts with boiled condensed milk, caramel, chocolate. While grasping, you can prop up on the sides with cups. At this time, attach the roof. So that she does not slip, hold for a while.
A gingerbread house is created in stages: first make the dough, then baking, assembly and decoration follow. Since pastries are stored for a long time, all this can be done gradually, slowly in your free time.
For several years in a row, on the eve of the New Year and Christmas, I have been baking gingerbread houses, but somehow they don’t come out very well for me, either uneven or somehow strange. For the last two weeks I have only been talking about this, and now ... I agreed to the point that my husband told me that there was nothing to do there, but to explain for a long time ... I took it myself and did it ...
Well, yes, it’s apparently easy for a design engineer, but it’s not given to us lawyers ...
In general, I’m still in shock how it all turned out like this for him, and after all, I dug up the recipe for gingerbread cookies somewhere, I didn’t cook like that. And he gave me a lecture that the dough for gingerbread must be kept in the cold for a day, what happens in it ... some kind of complicated word, I can’t presume to reproduce it. And two weeks in finished product the gingerbread will only get better and ripen. From myself, I can only add that the gingerbread is really very tasty. I was surprised that this amount of dough was enough for the house itself, for a large gingerbread at the base, for Christmas trees and a door. Probably the whole point is pedantry, if it is said to roll 4 mm, then it is necessary.
For gingerbread dough prepare flour, honey, butter, eggs, sugar, soda.
Sugar is better to take brown.
Put honey, butter, sugar in a bowl.
Put on a steam bath and heat until the butter and sugar dissolve.
Add spices. Separately, I want to say that such a mixture can be prepared in advance. Just grind all the spices in a coffee grinder and sift through a sieve. Add some flour and soda. Mix.
Remove mixture from heat and cool until room temperature and then beat in the eggs.
Add the rest of the flour and knead the dough. Wrap the dough in cling film and place in the refrigerator. The dough should lie for at least a day.
While the dough is chilling prepare the patterns. Each piece will need to be baked in duplicate.
When the dough is ready, it needs to be rolled out. It is important that the thickness of the parts is the same, and therefore it is better to use a roller that rolls out the dough of the desired thickness over the entire size of the cake. With the help of such nozzles, set the thickness of the dough rolling. When rolling out the dough sticks, use flour.
We cut out two parts of each pattern and bake at 180 degrees until cooked for about 15 minutes.
Remove the finished parts from the sheet and cool.
Let's prepare a mixture for drawing, this will require powdered sugar, egg white, and lemon juice.
Don't whip! Just grind the egg white with a fork and add the lemon juice. The mixture should not spread and it should be easy for her to draw.
With the help of a confectionery envelope, decorate the house at your discretion.
paint the roof under the tiles, and do not forget about the remaining two walls.
Christmas trees will also come in handy, they will be like that.
Leave all the details to dry for a couple of hours and when the glaze dries, you can assemble the house. To do this, cook thick sugar syrup, almost caramel and we do everything quickly, the caramel will quickly seize, it is not necessary to spread it all over the joint, it is enough to fix it in several places. Caramel holds very well and securely. Although you can glue on the glaze, it takes longer to dry and is more fragile.
The house is ready. The aroma from it is so spicy and New Year's that you can't do without a Christmas tree!
Faster already New Year!
Happy and happy holidays!