Lisa Anderson - Easy Gingerbread Houses: Twenty-Three No-Bake Gingerbread Houses for All Seasons

Easy Gingerbread Houses

Lisa Turner Anderson

Zac Williams

Easy Gingerbread Houses

Digital Edition 1.0

Text 2018 Lisa Turner Anderson

Zac Williams

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Gibbs Smith

P.O. Box 667

Layton, Utah 84041

Orders: 1.800.835.4993

www.gibbs-smith.com

ISBN: 978-1-4236-5035-5

For Matt and Malcolm

Making no-bake gingerbread houses is easy, fun, and best of all, fast! This book will show you how to make houses, castles, cottages, and more using graham crackers, cookies, ice cream cones, waffle bowls, and candy. Theres no need to mix dough, roll it out, bake it, and wait for it to harden. The house structures in this book take only minutes to make, meaning you can get to the decorating more quicklyand thats the best part.

A large piece of cardboardat least 1 foot by 1 footis the best base to build your house on. Its sturdy enough to pick up so that you can move your house easily. Be sure to cover your cardboard with waxed paper or aluminum foil so the frosting doesnt seep through.

Even if the house is small and doesnt take up much room on the cardboard, youll still want a large base so that you have plenty of room for decorating. The instructions for most of the houses in this book suggest that you spread icing around the house, such as green for grass or white for snow. Covering the whole cardboard base with icing helps your house look nice and neat.

While not all the houses in this book are made with graham crackers, most of them are. Building structures out of graham crackers requires a few tricks.

Most houses in the book require that you cut the graham crackers into shapes or smaller pieces. Instead of trying to break them with your hands, use a serrated knife, such as a steak or bread knife, to gently saw the cracker along the lines until the unwanted piece breaks off. If you try to break them with your hands, the pieces will usually break off unevenly.

The diagrams for each house will show you the sizes and shapes of the graham crackers you need. The blue parts of the diagram are the pieces of the crackers that need to be cut off and thrown away.

For many of the houses, you will need to glue 2 or more graham crackers together with icing to make a larger front, side, back, or roof piece. To help the pieces stay together, you will need to glue 1 quarter graham cracker across the seam, as shown in Diagram 1. This will help you make larger and more interesting houses without worrying about them falling apart. When you put the house together, make sure the reinforcing crackers are on the inside of the house.

Making gingerbread houses requires special icing called royal icing. It is made with egg whites, water, and powdered sugar, and is very strong, like glue. It dries to a hard candy-like finish that will last for months. You can use either raw egg whites or meringue powder (which has dried egg whites) to make the icing. While both versions make equally strong icing, I prefer using meringue powder because its easier to use and safer to eat than raw egg whites. You can find meringue powder at craft or cake decorating stores.

Makes 4 cups

3 egg whites

1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar

4 cups powdered sugar

In a large, clean bowl, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar together until the meringue has formed stiff peaks. Beat in the sugar, 1 cup at a time, until mixed together and smooth.

Makes 4 cups

1/4 cup meringue powder

1/2 cup water

4 cups powdered sugar

In a large, clean bowl, beat the meringue powder and water together until the meringue has formed stiff peaks. Beat in the sugar, 1 cup at a time, until mixed together and smooth.

Tinting the icing with food coloring is a fun and easy way to add more color to your houses. Gel food coloring works the best because it is super concentrated and makes deep, bright colors. You can find gel food coloring in most grocery stores, but the gels at craft and cake decorating stores come in many more colors and are even more concentrated.

When tinting your icing, use a craft stick or toothpick to add just a tiny bit of gel to the icing. A little bit goes a very long way. You can always keep adding more, but you cant add less.

The easiest way to use the icing to decorate your house is to spoon some of the frosting into a quart-size ziplock bag. Squeeze the air out of the top, then seal the bag. Double-check and make sure it is completely sealed or else the icing will come out the top when you squeeze the bag. Cut off a bottom corner of the bag and squeeze the bag to push the icing through the hole. The smaller the hole, the thinner the line will be when youre piping the icing. Youll usually want a thinner line when decorating, but you can use a thicker line when gluing the house together.

If you want to get a little more creative with the frosting, use pastry bags with your favorite tip such as an open star tip, a leaf tip, or a ruffle tip, to add a decorative border where the edges have been glued together, or icicles hanging from the roof. Fill and keep a few bags ready with different tips and colors of icing. Any icing that is left in the bowl needs to be covered with plastic wrap so that the plastic wrap is touching the surface of the icing. Icing that is exposed to air will turn hard quickly and you wont be able to use it. This goes for the ziplock or pastry bags filled with icing as well. You dont want the tips to dry out.

You can store royal icing in the fridge for a few days.

The projects in this book have suggestions of what kind of candy, cookies, cereal, or even pretzels to use so that your house looks the same as the one in the photo. But if you have an idea for a different color or shape of candy or edible decoration for the house youre making, go for it! The best part of making gingerbread houses is using your imagination and playing with different candies to come up with a cool design thats all your own. You can use any candy you want, with one exception: taffy. After taffy is unwrapped, it will eventually melt and run down the sides of your house. Trust meit doesnt look good!

Nothing is more frustrating than your gingerbread house falling down mid-decorating. These tips will help you make a sturdier structure.

Make sure the icing is the right consistency. Icing that is too dry wont adhere well to graham crackers. If its too dry, put it back in a bowl and beat in water, one tablespoon at a time, until the icing sticks well to the crackers.

Make sure you glue the graham cracker walls to the cardboard base as well as to each other.

Put a line of icing on each cracker when joining two together.

Save the roof decorating for last. If the roof is weighed down too early with candy, it may slide off before the icing is hard enough to hold.