Christmas gingerbread recipe

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without the smell of gingerbread baking in the kitchen. It’s a firm favorite with our children as they love both making and baking the gingerbread, then building and decorating it into a gingerbread house afterwards.

There are many gingerbread house kits on the market but it’s super easy to make your own at home.

Ingredients

For the gingerbread:

• 375g unsalted butter
• 300g dark brown sugar
• 150g golden syrup
• 900g plain flour
• 3 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 6 tsp ground ginger

For the decorations:

• 500g icing sugar
• different coloured boiled sweets
• chocolate buttons / dolly mixture / smarties

Method

• Pre-heat the oven to 0°C / Fan: 180°C / 400°F.
• Slowly melt the butter, sugar and syrup together in a large pan. Stir until combined.
  • TIP: You could do this in a microwave. Heat on high in 30 second blasts, stirring in-between until fully dissolved.
• In a separate bowl, add the flour, bicarbonate of soda and ginger and stir until mixed.
• Pour in the melted butter mix and stir until almost combined.
• Knead the mixture with your hands to form a dough.
• Dust flour over your work surface and roll out to approximately 3/4 cm thick.
• Use cutters and templates to cut out the sections of your house.
  • TIP: We use these cutters as they’re inexpensive, easy to clean and include extra cutters like the Christmas tree and Reindeer which are great for cutting festive pastry lids for mince pies!

• Carefully lay each section on grease-proof paper lined baking trays.
• Re-roll the gingerbread dough and use to make additional gingerbread decorations until all the mixture is used.
• Bake the gingerbread for 10-12 minutes.
  • TIP: If you want to create a stained-glass window effect, remove the gingerbread from the oven after 7-8 minutes, crush the boiled sweets and add to the windows. Bake for a further 3-4 minutes or until the sweets have fully melted.
• Remove from the oven, trim any edges to create clean-lines around the edges, then leave to cool.

• For the icing, add approximately 5 tsp cold water to the icing sugar form a stiff but spreadable paste.
  • TIP: Add the water one tsp at a time and stir until fully combined. If you add too much water and your icing becomes too runny, simply add more icing sugar to stiffen it up again.
• Spread the icing along the wall edges and join the house together.
  • TIP: Use either a pallet knife or a piping bag to get a neater finish.
• Once you have built the main construction of the house, leave it to set for an hour or two before decorating – this will reduce the likely-hood of the house breaking or falling down whilst your little ones decorate it.
• Finally, play some Christmas tunes, have a sing-along and using dolly mixtures, smarties, chocolate buttons or any of your favourite sweets, encourage the children to be as creative as they like with their decorations!