Dumb Question About Gingerbread Houses?

[mbosnz]

Are they for eating? Or just for looking? And when, if you make them, do you make them?

They are for eating but not all of them are very nice. The ones you get in supermarkets can be a hard texture because they need to be fairly easy to construct. The ones I've had from Germany are real gingerbread rather than ginger biscuit. If you're planning to eat it I probably wouldn't make it more than a week or two in advance. It's probably fine after that because it's just biscuit, icing and maybe some sweets, but I think it would be quite stale and might start collecting dust if it's been out on display

They should be for eating! I've only ever had one that was home made and it was bloody delicious.

We normally make ours the weekend before Christmas. I make the gingerbread and do basic construction, the kids decorate it, and I insist it is left to dry for a full overnight before we start breaking it up. I’d like to admire it for longer but it’s the process and the eating that the kids enjoy rather than the admiring! Plus ours actually tastes good.

I would bake the gingerbread on one day and construct it either that evening or first thing the next day. But we don’t try and do it all in one go.

I bake them myself. We eat them.

I usually buy the pre-cut gingerbread kits from Flying Tiger or John Lewis and then we make icing and buy sweets to decorate.

We make it all about mid-December and admire it for a few days before we all start to eat it.

I make a large one as a decoration that we keep for two or three weeks, and I make little ones for eating.

Ours is for decorating (Christmas Eve), admiring (lit up with a tea light on a timer for the evenings shining through the boiled sweet windows), sneakily picking the sweets off, and ritually smashing on New Years Day.

We used supermarket gingerbread which isn’t very nice but is very sturdy.

I think about making my own gingerbread (which is delicious and absolutely worth the effort) but then my thoughts spiral to making a scale model of our house or I spend too much time on Pinterest and lose touch with reality.

We make them a few days before Christmas and it’s for eating. Usually as part of Boxing Day tea.

That's fantastic, thank you so much! We're making it from scratch, so in the last few days before Christmas sounds ideal, and thanks for the tip to do the baking one day, and the decorating the next.

The marks and Spencer kits are really good too, if you don’t have time to make your own. I’ve had those.
my niece is coeliac too and my sister got one I think from Lakeland which was also good.

It's just the two of us for Christmas this year, and it's something we've wanted to do for ages - so we figure it's a perfect time to try something new, and if it's a spectacular failure it doesn't matter while we learn by trial and error!

My top tip is to make big trays of gingerbread and cut out the shapes for walls etc after it’s cooled. I have templates cut from a cereal box years ago.

It means you have nice straight edges so it fits together more easily. When I tried making them all separately the edges are all wobbly because of the rise and spread.

sadly it also means you end up with a tub full of gingerbread cut offs that need eating which is a shame :)

We have a tradition in our house of a gingerbread house bake-off. We split into two teams and each make a gingerbread house from scratch. The best one goes on ‘display’ over the Christmas period and the other one gets destroyed and eaten! Although more often than not they both look like crap 🫣😂

I’m a very competent baker but for some reason gingerbread houses are completely beyond me. If anyone has some top tips for how to get the f*ers to stay upright and not collapse in on itself I’d be hugely appreciative! After last year’s disaster, my DS suggested “How about gingerbread men next year!” 🤣

We decorate the slabs on Christmas Eve morning, construct in the afternoon, display, then eat some before bed, but then cover it to eat on Boxing Day

God knows how ours will go, lol. If DH has anything to do with it, it will be precisely and mathematically engineered. If I remember, and it actually gets done this year, I'll put a photo up!

never eat ours, we do mini houses and they are all fairly dry by the end of Christmas. bake our own and have cutters that we use

I prefer the chocolate ones for eating, but the gingerbread ones are ok, depending what you buy. I don't find the ones I've bought very tasty though. One year I tried doing both types homemade, but with kids, it is easier to use the sets, but I personally haven't found one that is easy enough for little kids to do together. Or maybe my kids have limited culinary/assembly skills, like their mum!
There were some rubber moulds (maybe Home Bargains? But look online) a few years ago that were great-you can do the hot bit, then get the kids to decorate and assemble their village, if you fancy that sort of thing. And they'd surely taste nice!

Enjoy making it! My teens make them now and they’re very mathematically / engineering precise.

Top tips -

The biscuits swell and change shape a bit when cooked. You can easily trim them back to shape when they’re warm out of the oven, and if you forget or need to adjust later, a microplane grater is good at filing it down a bit.

If you’re doing the “crushed sweets to make stained glass windows” thing, don’t forget to add the sweets in before it’s all finished baking!

If you’re making icing to stick the pieces together with, you need far less liquid than you think to add to the icing sugar. A really tiny amount.

Buy extra icing sugar in case you make the icing too wet and can’t stick the pieces together.

Flaked almonds look really pretty as roof tiles.

Leave a gap so you can put a small bundle of led wire fairy lights in there to glow through the windows. The battery pack can come out the back. It looks really pretty!

Oh, and it lasts for quite a while. A good week or so easily.

Sounds like my DH. We once made a castle, there were scale drawings.

Bake extra "bricks" and stick them to the bottom inside of the walls with icing (or melted chocolate) and let them dry before construction. Let the 4 joined walls dry before adding the roof @CoffeeChocolateWine

We always have one gingerbread house and one shortbread house, both home baked. Thick walls and thin roofs seems to work. Crushed Fox's Glacier fruits for windows.

That's fantastic. We (multiple facets of the family) use my great grandmother's stencils for ours.

I make mine from sugar cookie dough. Then put it together using a combo of icing and chocolate. Makes for a nicer bite when you’re eating it after Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve.

I think they’re for eating, but honestly they give me the heebie jeebies 😂. I think it’s the thought of all the components being handled so much in the baking and putting together, particularly if kids have helped. Which is weird, as I don’t mind other people doing things such as double dipping 🤔.

DH usually eats ours. We typically make them on the 22/23rd as something to do then DH eats some of it Christmas Eve and day. I think DC help him a bit. I don’t really like gingerbread. We got a Cadbury chocolate one once and that was demolished pretty quickly.