My girls love putting the lollies on, and eating them, so its a great activity to do with the kids. Not only are they cute to look at, they make your house smell great and are really delicious.
We usually make one big house each year that stands at about 20cm tall, but this year I decided to try and make a smaller template so we could have a few houses to decorate, that quickly turned into me trying put a template together for the mini gingerbread houses that sit on your hot chocolate mug.
But before we get to the templates and cutting out the pieces, we need to make some gingerbread dough.
What you need...
- 350 grams plain flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 3 teaspoons of ground ginger
- 100 grams diced butter
- 140 grams brown sugar
- 1 egg, beaten
- 1/3 cup of treacle
How you do it...
- Place flour, baking powder and ginger in a large mixing bowl and mix together with a wooden spoon
- Rub the butter into the dry mixture with your fingertips to make a breadcrumb looking mix
- Stir in the brown sugar
- Make a well in the centre and add in the egg and the treacle
- Mix well with a wooden spoon until quite firm, then start kneeding the dough with your hands.
- Once smooth, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for 20 mins.
- Divid the dough in to two, roll out on a floured clean bench to about half a centimetre in thickness
- Using the templates below cut out the house pieces. Make sure on the front piece you cut out the door section, I also like to use an extra small flower cookie cutter to create a window detail at the top of the house front.
- Bake on 180 degrees C for 8 mins
* This amount dough usually makes 1 large house or
4 small houses or many mini houses
Templates...
*This house will stand at about 12cm tall
*These houses stand at about 5cm tall.
Make sure you cut out doorways at both the front and back so you
can place them on your mugs, also make sure the doorways are
large enough to easily slip on your mug
* This is a larger house that stands at approximately 20cm tall
To cut the dough, I simply cut out the pieces of the template and lay them on the rolled out dough and
To glue the pieces together I make Royal Icing
You will need...
- 1 and 1/2 cups of icing sugar
- 1 egg white
- 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
How you do it...
- Lightly whisk the egg white in an electric mixer
- Add sifted icing sugar and the lemon juice in
- Beat until thick
- Quickly put the icing into a disposable piping bag, Royal icing set quite quickly, which is what makes it prefect for gluing the house together, so make sure you work as quickly as you can.
Below are a couple of video we made for putting the houses together.
And here is our finished products.
Hi. I can't download your templates. Please help. This all looks so cool
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