LITTLE HELPERS:With two small assistants this was always going to be more 'Blue Peter' than Martha Stewart, writes Catherine Cleary
THE ORANGE SMARTIE brushed the two-year-old's lips to howls of "No" and giggles from his brother and me. Realising his error, he posted the sweet through the gingerbread window to join a Lego fireman who was getting used to his new abode.
As cooking with small children goes, making a gingerbread house is as fun as it gets . . . for the children. Last year, attempts at gingerbread construction ended with carefully cut out gables and side walls turning to amorphous blobs when they hit the oven. There may have been some shouting. The five-year-old still remembers it with a battle-hardened look in his eye. The stuff of fond seasonal childhood memories it was not. At best the bits might have made a gingerbread bouncy castle. In reality it was a mess.
It is tricky to master a recipe (see below for a fool-proof version, from the BBC Good Food website, sugary enough to keep almost all its lines straight), and the decorating can be fraught as you hand sweets to children with instructions to stick them on the house. By 2pm on the day of the assignment, no-one had had lunch and we were all on a sugar-spun tight rope. A plate of sweets, the like of which is only seen on birthdays, was on the table waiting for the photographer to arrive. Several "snow showers" of icing sugar had been dumped on the flaked-almond shingle roof. It could have gone either way.
There is much to recommend about making a gingerbread house from scratch. Firstly, the results are edible which, in the case of some of the assemble-and-go kits, was certainly not the case. You can make the pieces the night before, unless your children are older, and are up to a longer baking session. The tricky business of constructing it - propping up the walls with plates and hoping your icing is sticky enough - is probably best done without very small builders helping. But the decorating is a job a two-year-old can manage, as long as you're not hoping for magazine perfection at the end.
We had several options before us on a sliding scale of wondrousness. A back issue of Martha Stewart Living showed the airbrushed domestic tycoon holding a gingerbread cake surrounded by gingerbread townhouses, their windows made from slightly paler gingerbread and all of it white-iced and glowing with tastefulness. It looked like a week's work in a professional kitchen with several pastry chefs to assist.
Next the German cutter kit, (which survived a house move and disastrous first attempt), which showed various options for houses with enough icing to induce diabetic coma. Finally, the two kit boxes showed the basic ice-and-decorate options available inside. With two small assistants this was always going to be more Blue Peter than Martha Stewart.
Perhaps tasteful minimalism is against the spirit of gingerbread houses. The American tradition is sometimes taken to extremes. In some villages there is an annual tradition where each resident will build a gingerbread replica of their home and bring it to the town hall where a gingerbread village will be reconstructed. Yes you can go all white and minimal but more is sometimes more. You start with curlicues and end up with randomly-dotted Dolly Mixtures, making sure to weed out the pre-sucked ones.
Of the two kits I bought - from Dr Oetker and from Ikea - the latter was definitely more edible. In typical Ikea fashion, it came flat-packed and with no frills. Two side walls, two gables, a chimney and a roof. It was an Anna's of Sweden Gingerbread House Kit and it cost £1.95. The instructions on the back told you to put it together with boiled sugar and wished you "Good Luck!" in several languages. But the biscuit was crisp and light and proved edible when we left it chimney-less in order to test it.
The Dr Oetker gingerbread kit came with everything but was rusk-thick and as appetising as medium-density fibreboard. "It's more of a gingerbread hut," the eldest pronounced, looking at the picture on the box. Its icing, which came in a toothpaste-style tube, had that Plasticine consistency familiar to anyone who has tried to nibble a novelty children's cake.
Having said all that, it took 10 minutes to assemble and wowed a corridor of junior infants the next day as it was delivered to the cake stall for the school fair. Like most gingerbread houses, its fate will probably be to be picked clean of jellies and mini-marshmallows and then binned along with the leftover Christmas pudding and turkey carcass.
So even if your gingerbread house has a sagging roof and non-symmetrical windows, the fact that it's decorated with sugar-crusted treats will bring out the inner Hansel and Gretel in everyone. "That's one hell-kicking thing," an older boy said, his eyes out on stalks, as we passed in the school with two of the houses. Not a phrase Tom Doorley has ever found himself reaching for, I'd imagine, but high praise indeed.
Gingerbread house
Cover a flat platter - a breadboard will do - with tinfoil and make sure it's big enough to take the house.
For the dough
200g unsalted butter
200g dark muscavado sugar
Seven tablespoons of golden syrup
600g plain flour
Two teaspoons of bread soda
Four teaspoons of ground ginger
Two teaspoons of cinnamon
For the icing
Two egg whites
500g icing sugar
To decorate
A selection of sweets
Heat the oven to 180 degrees/gas four. Melt the butter, sugar and syrup in a heavy-bottomed pan. In a bowl, mix the flour, bread soda and spices. Let the melted mixture cool for a minute then stir it all together to make a dough. Roll it out on to sheets of parchment paper to a thickness of about five millimetres
Using a cardboard set of shapes (or you can buy a cutter set from specialist kitchen shops) cut two roof panels, front and back gables and two side walls. A chimney is optional. Slide the baking parchment with its gingerbread shapes onto a flat baking tray and place on a shelf in the freezer for five minutes. (This helps it keep its shape).
Cook for between 15 and 20 minutes until it has turned a slightly darker brown. When the gingerbread has cooled completely, make up the icing and pipe it in lines with an icing bag to glue the walls to each other, with an extra line on the platter to keep it solid at the base.
Dab the sweets with a tiny blob of icing to make them stick to the walls. It will be edible for around a week, so you can get some kudos for your efforts before it is stripped bare.