Gingerbread House Construction Party

Although I’ve always been fascinated by gingerbread houses, I have never attempted one. In June 2016, I had an advance reader copy of Danielle Walker’s Against All Grains Celebrations, which had a paleo gingerbread house recipe in its Christmas section. So I decided that this was finally going to be my year to build my own gingerbread house. Unfortunately, at the time I had access to the advance reader copy, the link in the recipe headnote for downloading the gingerbread house templates was a dead one. And with that died my dreams of building a gingerbread house.

Researching The House Design

Late one night in early December, I was bitten by the curious bug again. Lying in bed, I Googled “gingerbread house templates” in the Internet browser on my cell phone. Up popped gorgeous photographs of gabled Victorian mansions and graph sheets of architectural schematics. I clicked on a couple of them, which led me to Pinterest and down some fascinating rabbit holes. Before long, I was convinced that Project Gingerbread House was a go! I figured I still had time to make the dough, assemble the pieces, and decorate the house before my Holiday Dessert Party. It would make a lovely centerpiece – and I could send it home with my gluten free friend!

It took me a few days to execute the same Google search on my laptop, but I was equally delighted by the initial results that were produced. And then, much to my dismay, Pinterest wouldn’t let me view anything until I logged in, and I really didn’t want to create yet another social media account. So I surfed some of the other sites that were suggested by Google, but they were lackluster compared to what I had seen on Pinterest on my cell phone a few nights before. Eventually, I settled for a rather modest house design from the King Arthur site. The beauty of the King Arthur instructional PDF was that it gave complete instructions for the gingerbread house – from making the dough to tiling the roof.

On a whim, I Googled “Against All Grain Gingerbread Template” and found that the template had recently been made available on the Against All Grain blog. I had to jump through some hoops to download it, only to find out that it wasn’t as pretty as the King Arthur template. But the advantage of this template was that I could be fairly certain that it would fit on one recipe of paleo gingerbread house dough.

The Initial House Attempt

After the templates were found, I took a second look at the recipe and determined that the only ingredients that I didn’t have were almond flour and maple syrup, which were easily obtainable at my local supermarket store. For the most part, I followed the recipe. I didn’t bother with sifting the dry ingredients – I never do – but I at least mixed them together in a separate bowl before starting with the creaming step. When checked my cabinet, found out the shortening that I had was a blend of coconut oil and red palm oil rather than just palm oil, but I figured I’d use it anyway rather than substitute butter, which was a possibility offered in the Tidbits following the recipe. I did substitute unsulfured molasses for the maple syrup because I wanted more of a “classic gingerbread flavor,” and because I had plenty of it in one of my cabinets. The creaming step went quickly because there was so little to cream. For some reason, I thought the recipe directed that this step would take seven to ten minutes, so I stood there with my electric hand mixer going around in circles for a while before I decided to go back to the computer and check the recipe. It actually said ONE minute, or until “light and fluffy.” After beating in the egg until combined, I added in the dry ingredients and beat until a dough formed. Because I was using a hand mixer, I got little dough balls forming. It wasn’t until I turned off the mixer and stuck my hands into the bowl that a good solid dough came together. All I had to do was knead it a few times, then divide it and wrap it plastic to chill in the refrigerator. All said and done, it was a quick and easy recipe. Unfortunately, I could tell by looking at it that it would not be enough for my desired house design. So I planned a trip to go back to the supermarket for another two pounds of almond flour the next afternoon, and the following evening made two more batches of gingerbread dough.

Unfortunately, there was a freak snowstorm on the morning of the Holiday Dessert Party. So time was too tight for me to turn the dough into a house or even a batch of Already Been Chewed Gingerbread Men. My gluten free friend received two of the three batches of dough as a parting gift on her way home from the party to bake at her leisure. She baked one of the doughs into cookies for her family for Christmas and said that they turned out very well.

Come New Year’s Eve, my gluten free friend and I each had one batch of gingerbread dough left. We decided to pool our dough resources and build the houses as part of our New Year’s Eve celebrations. But time got away from us. By 11pm, we still hadn’t even started rolling out the dough. So we decided to schedule a Gingerbread House Construction Party for the following weekend with the same crew – four ladies and one gentleman.

The Gingerbread House Construction Party

Unfortunately, the first snowstorm of the year cancelled our original plans for the Gingerbread House Construction Party. Therefore, we rescheduled for the following Saturday at 3pm. Midweek, I received a mildly panicked text from my really good friend. She had wanted to get a jump on the party prep by rolling, cutting, and baking the house pieces so that all we would have to do is assemble and decorate the houses at the party. But she had run into a problem: the dough was crumbling apart rather than rolling out. The solution was fairly simple: toss out the old dough and let me bring fresh dough to the party. I had the time in my schedule either on Friday night or Saturday morning, so it was not a problem. Later in the week, we all decided to move the start time up to 11am so that we would have plenty of time to roll out the dough, bake the house pieces, assemble the houses, and decorate the houses. Plus have lunch and dinner!

Our third attempt at getting together for a Gingerbread House Construction Party went really well! When I walked into my friends’ house, the two of them were in the kitchen debating what was wrong with a buttercream frosting made from a recipe that had been obtained using Google. One of them checked the recipe in her family cookbook and found out that there wasn’t enough confectioners’ sugar in the Google recipe. Once more confectioners’ sugar was added, the buttercream was fixed! Almost as soon as the buttercream was safely packed away into the refrigerator, our gentleman arrived and the discussion about what pizza to order for lunch began. My really good friend and I started to roll out the dough and cut out the house shapes while other two went on the pizza run. Since she is an engineer, she had no trouble designing her own basic house template from an 8½ by 11 sheet of paper, which she then traced onto cardboard so that it would withstand the grease of the cookie dough. For only having one-half cup of palm shortening to three cups of almond flour, the cookie dough was awfully greasy! We developed a system by which we would roll out two small pieces of dough between two pieces of parchment paper; then we would cut one house piece out of each piece of dough, remove the scraps, and carefully transfer the parchment with the house pieces to a cookie sheet. Tracking the numbers of different kinds of pieces became pretty comical. At one point, it took three of us to triple count the baked pieces before we were certain that we knew what we had. All said and done, we used all three recipes of dough that I brought; we were able to make enough pieces for four houses – two ladies were going to share a house – and several pine trees.

The next event in the Gingerbread House Construction Party was making the royal icing. Royal icing is a stiff icing that is used to hold the house pieces together, as well as stick candy pieces to the house and draw decorations on the house. I’ve never made royal icing before, so I suggested that we stick with the recipe that accompanied the paleo gingerbread recipe. That recipe basically required whisking two egg whites with three cups of confectioners’ sugar on medium speed until thick. Since I had needed six egg yolks for a Butterscotch Bourbon Pudding for my bourbon spiked recipes experiment, I was able to segregate six egg whites into three containers of two egg whites apiece. I brought those with me, and then we used the confectioners’ sugar at my friends’ house. The recipe was so simple that it worked out really well.

My gluten free friend was the first one to construct her gingerbread house, since she had experience using a piping bag in cake decorating and experience building gingerbread houses. My experience was limited to reading the instructions from the King Arthur Flour PDF! But she was super patient and showed me how to hold the house piece at an angle against the cardboard base so that you can measure how much icing to pipe onto the base to anchor the piece into. Apparently, it is a really good idea to anchor the house onto a cardboard base so that the house doesn’t move while you try to decorate it! Left to my own devices, I would have never thought of that. She also showed me how to pipe along the sides of the house pieces to fit them together, and acted as my second set of hands so my house frame wouldn’t collapse in on itself as I was getting my act together. Finally, she showed me how to carefully wedge the last piece into place because the other pieces may be slanted in (or out) and some adjustments may need to be made. All in all, with some very patient guidance from my friend, the structure of my house got built. We broke the top off of one of the doors in the construction process, but were able to repair it with some royal icing. I figured I could cover that up if I wanted to when I decorated.

After the other two friends built the frames of their houses, the piping bag of royal icing got refilled and it was time to put on the roofs. We were really fortunate that the first batch of royal icing was so good that the frames of the houses weren’t budging at all. The roofs were a little trickier to put on because my friend designed them to overhang at the bottom. So we needed to put the royal icing on the house frame, gently press on the roof piece, assess any gaps, and then do additional piping to fill in the gaps. And then repeat with the other roof piece. And then pipe closed the seam at the top in between the two roof pieces. I was really afraid that my house frame was going to collapse when I pressed on my first roof piece, but it held up admirably. Same when I pressed on my second roof piece.

While some folks were in the kitchen making a scrumptious bacon wrapped meatloaf for dinner and getting that into the oven, the rest of us were in the dining room organizing the candies into clear plastic cups for decorating the gingerbread houses. I can’t even remember all the candies that we had: Dots, Mike & Ikes, M&Ms, Red Hots, Fruit by the Foot, Bells, candy canes, pumpkins, licorice all sorts, candy corn, caramels, chocolate chips, white chocolate melts, and so much more. The entire center of the table was covered with small glasses of candy, jars of colored sugar, and containers of cake decorations.

When we all reconvened at the table to decorate our houses, I had a vision for the roof of my house, but not much more. I spackled my roof in white buttercream so it looked like a snow covered roof - making sure to leave enough white buttercream for someone else to use some too! Then I sorted through the glass of Dots and picked out enough red ones to line the ridge of the roof. I had intended to sprinkle cupcake pearls on the buttercream roof to look like little snowflakes, but those just bounced all over the place and made a fair bit of a mess. So that was a no-go. I lined up white chocolate melts along the edges of the roof to look like overhanging snow, which I thought was pretty clever. Finally I used yellow Mike & Ikes to outline the front edge of the roof and orange Mike & Ikes to outline the back edge of the roof. And then my creativity was spent…

My friends did some amazing things with their houses. One of the ladies took two pumpkins, stacked them, covered them in royal icing, and decorated them like a snowman. It was so adorable!!! She also stacked white chocolate melts with royal icing and topped it with a blue pearl to make white trees by her front door. And then she made a tipsy chimney out of caramels. Not to mention the green buttercream trees. Another lady flattened out caramels to make a door with an M&M as a door knob. She used Fruit by the Foot to make stained glass windows on the sides of her house, and then separated the Fruit by the Foot along the squiggly perforations to make decorations around the door and on the edges of the roof. And she was a whiz with the green buttercream decorations all over her house! Her thought process was that she wanted as much icing on her house as possible so that she could eat as much icing as possible. Our gentleman was not to be outdone. He used the royal icing to draw doors and windows on his house, as well as attach a picket fence made of candy corn. He had a pumpkin for a chimney and a very ornate walkway made up on the cardboard leading to the front door. The other three houses put my fancy little roof to shame!

The Verdict

Overall, the Gingerbread House Construction Party was a great day! It took some planning and coordination to pull off so many different tasks in one day, but it was well worth it to spend a day with such good friends learning a new skill.

The both gingerbread dough and the royal icing recipes from Danielle Walker’s Against All Grains Celebrations cookbook are definitely keepers. They were so on point that I am willing to try other recipes from that cookbook; perhaps Sticky Buns or Cinnamon Rolls will be next?