Gingerbread house

| KU | CHEN | HOUSE

1. small house made of gingerbread pieces and icing, which is decorated with sweets and set up for decoration during the Christmas season

Construction plan

Image: Construction plan gingerbread house

You don't bake a witch's house in one day, you should reserve two long evenings for it. It is divided into 3 construction phases:

1. Shell construction from gingerbread
2. Assembling and baking the Wibele for the roof decoration
3. Decoration with cookies Sweets and a lot of icing

Step one and two are usually done on the first evening, the decorating should be saved for the next evening when you have a steady hand again.

You can find the full recipe here.

thx to Thomas from omoxx !

So let's get started. First we make the gingerbread:

Gingerbread

Ingredients

• 500 g honey
• 200 g sugar
• 4 eggs
• 3 tsp gingerbread spice (cloves, allspice, cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper)
• 200 g ground almonds
• 1 kg flour
• 4 tsp baking powder

Preparation

1. Heat the honey in a water bath so that it becomes liquid. Add the sugar and dissolve while stirring. Then add the gingerbread spice.
2. Add the remaining ingredients and work into a smooth dough. Let it rest for a short time (about 30 minutes). Roll out the dough to a thickness of 1 cm and cut out the walls of the witch's house.
3. The remaining dough is rolled out into a base plate. The gingerbread house will be built on this.
4. Before baking the gingerbread, prick the surface with a fork so that it does not puff up too much.
5. Bake at 180°C (top-bottom heat) for about 20" minutes.

Notes

Let the finished gingerbread cool down, possibly trimming the edges a bit if they have rounded too much. (But remember that a witch's house is inherently crooked and crooked, so don't be too perfectionist.)

While the walls cool down, we take care of the roof decoration. For this we bake the Wibele.

Shingles, "Wibele"

Wibele are a Swabian speciality and are made from sponge cake dough. It takes some patience to make this little pastry, but for our witch's house there is no alternative, you have to go through ;)

Ingredients

• 2 eggs
• 50 g sugar
• 65 g flour
• 25 g cornstarch
• !/2 vanilla pod
• 1 pinch of baking powder

Instructions

• Separate the eggs. Beat the egg yolks with 2/3 of the sugar and the vanilla pulp until fluffy. Beat the egg whites in a clean bowl until stiff. Slowly add the remaining sugar and continue beating until a very stiff shiny mixture is formed. The beaten egg whites are only ready when they get stuck in the bowl when you turn it over (but this can also go wrong, so the cutting method is more suitable). If you cut the beaten egg whites with a knife, the cut must not close immediately.
• Put the egg yolk mixture on top of the beaten egg whites, mix flour, cornstarch and baking powder and sift over it (the flour must be really very fine). Then carefully fold everything in. (do not stir!!) A fluffy, light dough must be created, which is immediately piped onto a baking tray with a piping bag (with a fine nozzle).
• To give the Wiberle the right shape, pipe two pea-sized drops next to each other on a baking tray lined with baking paper. The drops run into each other and form the shape of a figure of eight, or shoe sole, after baking.
• A Wiberle should not be longer than 1.5 - 2 cm long. This is a real test of patience, but after the second tray you have the momentum out ;)
• The Wieberle are baked at about 160°C (top bottom heat) for about 10 minutes until they are light yellow.

TIP:

The best way to get the dough into the piping bag is to place it in a wheat beer glass and turn it inside out halfway. Then pour in the dough with a spatula, turn the piping bag back and carefully stroke downwards.

Now we can slowly start assembling. To glue together, we use frosting.

The icing

Ingredients

• 2 tsp egg whites
• 3-4 drops lemon juice
• 100 g powdered sugar

• Instructions Mix the egg whites together with the icing sugar and lemon juice until stiff, shiny. The sugar glaze must not flow, add a little more sugar if necessary.

Glue the gingerbread walls together with the icing. You can use toothpicks to support the walls well until the frosting is firm. The roof gable and the corners of the houses are covered with Wiebele.

Spread the edge of the roof thickly with icing and carefully pull it down with a toothpick so that icicles form.

Source: Recipe at omoxx.com

The shell of the witch's house is ready, now it's time for the exterior design. I definitely have to use vanilla pretzels, but all other sweets are also allowed. The more colourful the offer, the brighter the children's eyes. A witch's house is kitschy !

Vanilla pretzels

Ingredients

• 250 g flour
• 125 g butter (or margarine)
• 125 g sugar
• 1 egg
• vanilla pulp from a pod
• Glaze of 100 g icing sugar + lemon juice

In itself this is a simple shortcrust pastry, but to make it vanilla pretzels you have to consider the following. Usually it is said that you should not knead a shortbread too long if possible, so that the dough remains nice and crumbly. In this case, contrary to all other statements, the dough should be kneaded particularly vigorously and long. Then form 2-3 rolls of about 3-4 cm diameter from the dough and cut them into 1 cm thick slices. Use the heel of your hand to roll sausages about 8 cm long, which you place in the shape of a pretzel on a baking tray with baking paper.

The Vanill pretzels are baked at max 180°C (top – bottom heat) for 12 -15 minutes. It is essential that they remain bright.

Brush the warm pretzels with glaze and let them cool.

TIP:

To have a little more variety in the decoration, you can also roll out some dough and cut it out with as small shapes as possible. These cookies need a little shorter in the oven.

Spread the cookies with glaze and decorate with colorful sprinkles.

In addition to the pastries, the witch's house is decorated with all kinds of sweets. It's just important that the things aren't too big, because that doesn't look pretty. Basically, however, you can let your imagination run wild.

• Smarties,
• gummy bears,
• chocolate gold coins,
• chocolate coins with colorful sprinkles,
• candy canes
• and and and ...

All the things are reattached with our all-icing glue. Sometimes it is very helpful to fix the things with toothpicks until the frosting has set. In the meantime, it looks like a hedgehog in acupuncture, but after about 1 hour you can remove the supports again.

Our witch's house gets the finishing touch with an extra thick layer of powdered sugar. That's the snow and it also conceals one or two blunders in the construction planning.

TIP:

The witch's house keeps well for up to 3-4 weeks. If the gingerbread has become too hard after this time, you can store it in a tin with a piece of apple for a few days, which will make it soft again (if the gingerbread house survives at all).

Source: Recipe at omoxx.com

thx to Thomas from omoxx