Bold Projects → Gingerbread Architecture

So, it’s the holidays. And you feel the need to combine baking, frosting, and copious amounts of candy with questionable structural engineering and architecture choices. You could use the graham cracker method employed by the public school system, or go to the store and buy one of those pre-made gingerbread house deals.

Or, you could have an intrepid holiday adventure and build something epic! Be bold. It may fall apart overnight or look nothing like you had planned. But it will taste much better than either of the easier options and you’ll have more fun in the process! My sister-in-law and I have been experimenting with building gingerbread engineering marvels (with varying degrees of success) every Christmas for years, and it’s become something of a family tradition in our house.

Step 1: Brainstorm Ideas for Your Project

What are we doing here? Just a four-sided house? Does it have a chimney?? Or is it a plantation style mansion with a columned porch? Or maybe you’ve recently come back from Morocco and you’re building a castle with Moorish influences. Or perhaps you’re going the multi-building approach and making a village or a ghost town. So many options, but it’s important to have an idea first, since it can affect step 2 (and will also help you determine whether your idea is feasible). I generally sketch an isometric elevation view of the idea – this will also  help with creation of the templates in step 4.

Step 2: Get Decorations

This probably seems like a ridiculous step, because obviously you need stuff to decorate your creation, but your idea may require some specific items. Sometimes we have stained glass windows included in our designs (more on that in Step 5), which means we need to get Lifesavers hard candies. We often plan to do a “shingled” roof, so we need something like Chex mix or those weird layered sugar wafer cookies that no one actually eats. Our watermill featured a thatched roof, for which we used Shredded Wheat. If you’re doing a porch, rolled wafer cookies work well as columns (like Pepperidge Farm’s Pirouette rolled wafers). Knowing what your design elements are before you get candy can be really helpful.

Step 3: Make and Refrigerate Dough

There are lots of recipes that will work, but you definitely want one that will make a gingerbread capable of holding some weight. We’ve found that this recipe from Martha Stewart for gingerbread snowflakes works well.

Step 4: Create templates for house components

Assuming you’re going totally bespoke, you won’t have a cutter and will therefore need to create some kind of guide/template so you’ll cut the appropriate size walls, roof, etc. I go old school craft style and use a ruler, pencil, and printer paper. Don’t forget to note where you want windows and doors (you don’t necessary have to have these cut into the templates, since precise sizing and location isn’t necessary on these elements, but you don’t want to forget about them when you cut the gingerbread), and how many of each piece you need (4 walls for instance).

Step 5: Roll and cut dough

Roll the dough and use your templates to cut all of your walls, roof pieces, chimneys, etc, and transfer the cut pieces to your baking sheet (we recommend lining with parchment paper to make for easy non-stick removal after baking). Cut windows and doors in necessary locations. Once you’re done cutting and prepping the pieces, place the cookie sheets in the refrigerator until dough is firm (do this whether or not your recipes requires it); refrigerating the cut dough prior to baking will help the pieces to maintain their shape when baking (although some spreading appears to be unavoidable). If you’re doing stained glass, you’ll need to prep it now. Smash your lifesavers into pieces (but not to dust, you want chunks). We used to add the lifesavers to the windows at this point, but since spreading of the gingerbread is unavoidable, we ended up losing most of our windows during baking. What seems to work better is to pull the gingerbread out of the oven a few minutes before it’s done, and recut the windows. Then quickly add the Lifesaver chunks in the open windows, filling the space completely, and return the gingerbread to the oven for several minutes. It only takes a few minutes for the lifesavers to melt, creating “stained glass”. You can also just do regular windows using whatever that flavor is that’s sort of light yellow/transparent (I think maybe it’s pineapple??).

Step 6: Bake and Cool

Self-explanatory. Follow the directions in your recipe. If you have stained glass components, make sure these are fully cooled before moving, otherwise you’ll leave your glass in a gooey mess on the parchment paper (you can test by poking gently with a toothpick). If you need to trim any of your pieces (for instance, to open up doors or square up edges), it’s easiest to do it now, before the gingerbread has cooled – you’ll also run a much smaller risk of cracking your pieces if you cut them while they’re still warm.

Step 7: Assemble

We recommend using royal icing as the “glue”, like this recipe from Serious Eats, although there are countless recipe options out there that will work. Assemble your components, starting with your walls, and allow them to dry and achieve some measure of stability before adding your roof, porch, chimney, and other secondary architectural features. Once everything is dry, and assuming the structure supports itself, the fun really begins and you can start slapping candy on that bad boy. This is always the most time-consuming part for me and generally spans a couple of days. I’m lucky if portions of my creation don’t get eaten by my family during this time.

Step 8: Enjoy!

This may mean admiring your creation or eating it (or a combination of the two). If it’s hideous, it’ll still be really tasty. If it’s beautiful, take a picture, then eat it.

Bold Projects → Gingerbread Architecture