Chez Luce

Recipe: Gingerbread House

So I decided to join the Daring Bakers. Basically, it’s a food blog baking ring, which coaxes people into baking complex and challenging confections once a month.

It being December and all, my inaugral challenge was to bake a festive gingerbread house. Anyone who knows me will be aware that I am one of the clumsiest people alive, so a 3-D baked structure definitely wasn’t going to be my strong point. But anyway. I took a deep breath, and set about making the dough.

The recipe I chose was Scandinavian Gingerbread (Pepparkakstuga) from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book by Beatrice Ojakangas. We were given a choice of two, and I chose this one because the other recipe contained cream which I didn’t have any of!

I blended up the ingredients in the magimix to give a stiff dough which I left in the refrigerator for a couple of days while I visited my parents for Christmas (which was lovely, by the way).

Upon my return I rolled and baked the pieces, using this template. They shrunk quite a bit in the oven, and were much much thicker than they should have been. I will know for next time I make a gingerbread house (it may be some time…!) that the dough should be rolled very thinly. The pieces for the chimney came out very misshapen so I decided that the house would have electric heating rather than a wood-burning fire…

Anyway, this is how it turned out, I don’t think I did a bad job overall, but I look forward to my next daring bakers’ challenge which will hopefully be something more delicious than disastrous!

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