How to Bake and Construct a Gingerbread House

I was sent some baking and decorating ingredients by Tesco so that I could blog about us baking, constructing and decorating a Gingerbread House.

If you've ever wondered how to make a Gingerbread House and been put off thinking it's complicated, give it a go as it is much easier than you think.

If we can do it, then anybody can do it!

We used this recipe from the Tesco Real Food website to bake our Gingerbread House.  There's a handy video to talk you through baking, constructing and decorating your Gingerbread House.  You can download a template too if you want to use your own favourite gingerbread dough recipe. 

All three of my daughters helped roll out the dough and my 11yo cut out the template, she is such a perfectionist. Obviously I have no idea where she gets that from! LOL

We baked the pieces on Friday evening after dinner. A boiled sweet was put into the window squares of the dough so that it melted in the oven and created window panes.

I constructed the walls of the house late on Friday night and then added the roof early on Saturday morning. I was at an event in London all day so the icing holding the house together had a chance to set firm before we decorated it on Saturday evening. 

All 3 girls are good at using piping bags, I made my own out of baking paper.  We used royal icing to attach the decorations to our Gingerbread House.  I found some rainbow coloured sheets of fizzy sweets and some Santa, snowman and tree sweets at Poundland which came in handy too.  

We used chocolate covered raisins for the roof tiles, loads of 100's and 1000's, melted chocolate, little chocolate beans and other sweets to decorate the front, back and walls of the house.  Here are the pics of our finished Gingerbread House which we took to Church for pudding after Christmas Lunch:

Side view of our Gingerbread House

Front view of our Gingerbread House



Back of the Gingerbread House



Gingerbread House from above

We had so much fun baking, constructing and decorating our Gingerbread House. I really recommend giving it a go this week as some school holiday entertainment.  If a Gingerbread House is too much to contemplate, try baking gingerbread cookies and decorating them instead.

But wait there's more! LOL

There will also be an SOS team set to work on the Tesco Real Food Twitter account  @TescoRealFood.  A team of experts has been hired to rescue Brits from kitchen disasters as they prepare for their festive feasts.  The team will be online 10am-8pm on Christmas Eve and 8am-4pm on Christmas day.  Tesco think it's a really great idea that has never been tried by any supermarket before and their experts are just a tweet away, just in case the worst does happen!