Monday, December 28, 2009

Faux Gingerbread House

This year I wanted to make sure I had time to make a gingerbread house but I was inspired by an old Martha Christmas book to make this faux one instead, complete with candy windows. Here's a link to a similar way to construct this.

I used this gingerbread recipe and my best interpretation of the house. You can see the template at the top of the photo. I didn't trace it- just free-handed it. I also slightly overbaked it.

Even though it's hard to see, I made candy window panes out of sugar ( recipe in the link). I just poured the molted sugar into circles on the silpat and used a knife to trim. Martha makes clay molds but that was unnecessary. I have also made candy windows by crushing hard candy like peppermints, filling the windows and baking with the dough. They sometimes turned out great, other times, not so good.

Once cooled, I attached the candy window to the house with royal icing.

Finally, the house went on our buffet. Note the hanging snowflakes from our previous post.
And the results were great! My windows weren't as amber as I had thought but the faux house looked very pretty. I might save it and make more for next year! I actually used to make an entire facade village...maybe next year!