The 2017 Gingerbread Houses

This year the children broke up for the Christmas holidays well before Christmas - ten whole days in fact! It's been really nice, we've spent some time with family and had the chance for a bit of a tidy up and just general chilling out at home with Lego and Minecraft.

Yesterday we continued a tradition which is now in its sixth year and made our gingerbread houses. As always I used this recipe - How to make a gingerbread house - which I've adapted slightly to reduce the quantities of the melted ingredients. I also only use golden syrup instead of treacle, it seems to work out fine. That recipe also comes with a printable template, and if you reduce the size to 75% then there will be enough dough to make two smaller houses with a bit extra for some extra biscuits.

I always make the pieces the day before so that they have time to harden up a little bit before assembling the houses. This year I didn't bother with the boiled sweets for the windows as we never eat the ones that are left over. Here are the pieces all ready to go!

I use Royal Icing to stick the pieces together and I just use the powder that you add water to, usually the Tate and Lyle one. I normally use an Icing Syringe set (affiliate link) which makes it really easy to get the icing where it needs to go and looking neat, it's also good for icing on some extra decorations if you have some spare icing. Unfortunately I was using up some Royal Icing from last year which had gone a bit lumpy and it kept clogging the syringe so I had to do my best with a knife! Then I just put out lots of different sweets and let the children loose.

Harry spent a lot of time planning the placement of his sweets and thinking about making it look like a real house.

Mia used her sweets to make a face on each side of the roof, and was most interested in making sure that there were some sweets left over that she could make a start on straightaway!

Here are the finished houses for this year!

I'll leave them out for us to admire until tomorrow, then I'll break them up and put the pieces into cake tins for us to munch on. I shouldn't think that they will last very long - I'll be very surprised if there is any left for Christmas day!

I made our first gingerbread house back in 2012, and you can read about all of them here - Our yearly gingerbread houses.

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