Gingerbread House

If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen the gingerbread house Amber and I made. It turned out so cute!

Neither Amber or I would consider ourselves bakers. We can follow instructions and she’s creative, but those are the only skills we brought. So, if you’re looking to make a gingerbread house from scratch but have no idea where to start, I thought I’d share the recipes I used,

I used the gingerbread recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction, but I doubled it. We had enough left over to make some cookies, like the tree you see in the photo, but not enough to make another house. The design of the house came from https://bestgingerbreadhouses.com/gingerbread-house-templates/. The original dimensions were 13cm x 8 cm, but that seemed too small, so we increased it to 18 cm x 13 cm. Yeah, I’m not a fan of working in centimeters either. We were afraid to cut out the window – maybe next year.

I used the royal icing mix from Spend with Pennies and it actually worked! We bake the dough on Friday, let it cool, and didn’t put it together until Saturday evening. Then, we let it sit until Monday evening to decorate it. By then it was nice and solid. I used the buttercream recipe from the same post at Sally’s Baking Addiction, and I doubled it too. We did have some left over. We picked up cheap piping bags and plastic tips. This is the first time either of us have piped frosting, but I think it would not have looked nearly as cute if we had to do it with spoons and knives. We used some brown food coloring for the doors, windows, and shingles, but we couldn’t find any green, which would have been perfect for garland.

Obviously, we used a bunch of candies and sprinkles. And we have a bunch left over to nibble on. Wilton’s Santa and reindeer were the perfect finishing touch.