A Gingerbread House recipe

Here is the recipe Menticia and I used when we made our gingerbread house in 2-1/2 hours, start to finish. Photos and further directions here.

A Gingerbread House This is a spicy, rather than gingery, German recipe. It makes construction-grade gingerbread, I would not use it for cookies. It makes a small house - one could say, a casita. 5-1/2-6 cups flour 2 T baking powder 1 ts cinnamon 1 ts cloves 1/4 ts nutmeg 1 ts ginger 1/2 ts salt 3/4 c honey 1-3/4 c sugar 1/4 cup butter 1/3 cup fresh lemon juice grated peel from the lemons 1 egg 1 egg yolk Put a layer of wax paper in an 11x17 pan and spray it with that strange cooking spray or else butter the wax paper very liberally - if you don't, the wax paper will stick to the gingerbread. Stir the first 7 ingredients together. In a saucepan, melt the butter, honey, and sugar together, and cook till the sugar dissolves. Add the peel and lemon juice to the hot mixture. Pour into a metal bowl and cool. (We were in a hurry so we floated it in ice water.) Beat in 2 cups of the dry ingredients, beat in the egg and egg yolk, beat in the rest of the flour. At the end I recommend squishing it together with your hands. You want it quite stiff but not crumbly. Put little blobs of the dough all over the wax paper, touching each other, and then squash them together, pushing them into the corners and edges. We then used the side of a straight glass to roll the stiff dough flat. Cook for about 30 minutes, pull the pan out of the oven and cut the shapes (see scale drawing using a plastic knife. Don't take them out of the pan yet - put the pan back in the oven and bake for 5 or 10 minutes more. Now use your spatula to remove the shapes from the pan and put them on a cooking rack. (Miter the roof pieces now.) If you're in a hurry, get a fan and blow the pieces cool, turning them occasionally. Meanwhile make the icing-glue: 2 egg whites about 3 cups of confectioners sugar Whip the egg whites frothy and then add the sugar and beat, beat, beat till the stuff gets stiff. Stuff half the goo into a pastry bag with a smallish opening.

Technorati Tags: Recipe, Gingerbread, Christmas Cookies