Daring Bakers: Gingerbread House

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.



I hope everyone is well and you're all recovered from your New Year's Eve celebrations. Mine was a fantastic low-key evening which is exactly what I wanted. As usual, I am late with my DB challenge. Even though I have been off work and had plenty of time the last two weeks, my fridge debacle kept me from getting a lot of cooking done. However, it's a new year folks. I have a new fridge and I am about to start a new decade of my life. Perhaps from now on I will even be on time with my Daring Bakers challenges...don't hold your breath.

I decided to go with Anna's recipe for the gingerbread because I was short on time and it was pretty straightforward. I decided to do a quarter of the recipe and I found the "blueprint" for my house over at Delectible Deliciousness.

The gingerbread was really easy to make. If you want the recipe, you can find it here on Anna's site. It got a little sticky because I chose to roll and cut out the shapes on a floured mat before transferring them to the baking sheet. The royal icing was pretty easy to make as well. The only change I made was to flavor it with vanilla extract instead of almond. In case you hadn't heard from the other bakers, that royal icing is like caulk. I was prepared to take it in my bathroom and fix some things in the tub. Mine was way too thick to pipe so I ended up rolling it and using it to piece the house together along with a bit of the simple syrup.

Assembling the house was a huge pain in the ass. I'm not going to lie, but after a few attempts I finally pieced together was you see above. I didn't do much in terms of decoration, but hey, at least I got it done. The other Daring Bakers were way more creative about this than I was. Check out their creations on the blogroll.