The building block
The secret is in the icing used to hold it together
Icing the secret to setting up a gingerbread house.
One of the biggest lies you will ever be told is this: the packet of white frosting with a plastic spout that comes with a gingerbread house kit will never hold your house together for very long.
Even after all the kneading and warming and squeezing and gentle guidance onto each piece of paper bag-colored cookie, the frosting never cements wall to wall and roof to edible sill plate without waiting for minutes on end, acting as a human clamp, to hold pieces in place. Once you add slabs of your modular structure to the first corner you have firmly affixed, everything shifts. Corners are no longer plumb. 90-degree rectangles become askew parallelograms. The roof slowly pulls away from its peak and drifts downward. And it is all thanks to that inferior, gummy frosting glue.
Save yourself the discouragement and start by making a simple melted sugar caramel that will instantly bind pieces of your gingerbread house together. Bubbling sugar might seem intimidating, but the process is simple and the sugar can be drizzled or spread with a spoon, or the edge of your walls can be dipped directly into your pan of sugar for uniform coverage. It is important not to skip on adding lemon juice to your sugar, and the sugar will convert the sucrose molecules in sugar to fructose and glucose. It may seem like a small differentiation, but plain sucrose (that is, sugar only) will begin to crumble as the gingerbread house ages over the days leading up to the holidays and the conversion to glucose and fructose will keep the sugar in a tightly bound state for weeks, if not months.
You may not want to eat the gingerbread house if it survives well past the holidays are over, but that is not to say that it should lack flavor.
Gingerbread has a long, global history as one of the world’s first cookies starting in China with the use of ginger in baked items and extending through Europe with the rise of the spice trade.
The recipe has not changed much in time and the dough is perfect for making person-shaped cookies to fill a holiday platter or for making the walls, roofs, doors, awnings and shutters.
Dutch and German settlers in America made springerle, an embossed cookie, rich with gingerbread-like flavors before English settlers brought the traditional gingerbread that we know today. Gingerbread recipes today rely on the thick sweetness of molasses, kept from turning cloying by the acid of citrus zest. A strong dough with plenty of flour, the smells of cinnamon, ginger, cloves and allspice scent the cookie for long after it has baked. The recipe has not changed much in time and the dough is perfect for making person-shaped cookies to fill a holiday platter or for making the walls, roofs, doors, awnings and shutters.
Cutting out the pieces for the gingerbread house is tricky sometimes, as the pieces are large and moving them from counter to cookie tray can lead to misshapen forms. Here’s a secret to prevent that: Roll the cookie dough out on the counter and move the blank rolled dough onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Use gingerbread house cookie cutters to cut out the pieces, or a paring knife to cut around paper templates. Remove the excess dough before baking. If the sides have bumps or seem not straight, use a microplane or the small holes of a box grater to file down the bumps after baking and create a straight edge.
To decorate your gingerbread, classic royal icing is a sure bet. Thin it with water if you want to whitewash your gingerbread house (use a clean craft paint brush to apply the thinned icing to your house) or reduce the amount of egg whites to mix a thicker icing that can be dyed ( gel-based dye works best) and piped using a variety of tips. Royal icing hardens quickly and maintains a glossy sheen and will not melt as your house remains on display. Use small dots of icing to affix candies to your house.
Of course, you can buy house-building kits to skip ahead to the best part — the decorating — but if the fallacy of white frosting glue falls upon your endeavors, try using our recipe for caramel “glue” to ensure your house remains upright and true throughout the holiday season.