Festive DIY: Tiny gingerbread houses

It’s not difficult to build a house. Especially when its four walls are made of gingerbread. With our gingerbread mix, you can easily make the basic structure. Even the more advanced work requires less engineering than Christmas spirit. We’ll show you how it’s done step by step.

When your gingerbread house is finished, you can not only enjoy the sight of it, but also wrap it up and give it away.

Before you start baking, make sure you have everything you need. For the gingerbread, you’ll need the honey gingerbread spice mix, flour, sugar, honey, eggs, baking soda and some milk. It’s best to follow our recipe for honey gingerbread. You will need icing sugar and egg whites to glue the components together and to decorate. How you decorate the gingerbread house is up to you: Try using blanched almonds and small colourful sweets. Don’t skimp on the icing sugar, especially if you want a pretty snow cover for your gingerbread house.

Bake the gingerbread as in our recipe for honey gingerbread (the quantity is enough for at least 5 of our small gingerbread houses) and give it enough time to rest. Wrap it in cling film and put it in the fridge for at least an hour, or even better, overnight.

Then roll it out. Make sure that the dough is not thicker than 4 millimetres. Now cut out the parts – 4 walls and two roofs. We have prepared templates to help you: Simply print out, cut out and use them as a guide!

Place the cut-out parts in the preheated oven at 175 degrees Celsius for 5 minutes. Check with a finger whether the gingerbread is already finished by pressing lightly on it. If the bump remains, it still needs time. Once the dent is evened out, take the gingerbread out of the oven.

When the components of your gingerbread house have cooled down, you can use a fine grater to adjust the edges if the shape has changed during baking.

Then mix one egg white with 200 grams of icing sugar and stir until it forms a fine mass without lumps. You can use the icing to glue the pieces together and decorate the outside of the house.

Use a pastry bag to apply the icing to the outer edge of the four outer walls to build up the four foundation walls first. Hold the pieces together and don’t let them go until they are truly stuck together. Then carefully work on the two roofs. Your first house will soon be standing, hopefully! Remember that the icing will get thicker and thicker over time, so don’t take too long!

Now you can decorate your house however you like. Make a pattern with icing, paint windows and other elements or use it to stick on sweets, such as chocolate lentils, and almonds. The sky’s the limit for your imagination. Last but not least, use icing sugar to make a little snow fall on your little houses.

Our little gingerbread houses make great gifts – wrap them in cellophane, for example, or put them in small packages. Or, you can build a little Christmas town by making the gingerbread houses in different sizes (just print out the template in different formats) and place them next to each other.