Make Gingerbread this Christmas

This Christmas if there is one thing you try your hand at making some gingerbread. It's really easy, doesn't take long at all and fills your home with the most gorgeous, gingery christmasy smell ever.

I have tried various receipes over time and this one seems to work best for me. I found it on the BBC Goodfood website.

This receipe is enough to make one standard gingerbread house but you could also make gingerbread shaped cookies or mini gingerbread houses and if you have some left over can always keep it in your fridge for a few days if you didn't want to cook it all at once.

Ingredients

• 250g unsalted butter

• 200g dark muscovado sugar

• 7 tbsp golden syrup

• 600g plain flour

• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

• 4 tsp ground ginger

Instructions:
1) Preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6
2) In a pan melt the sugar, golden syrup and butter on a low heat
3) Mix the flour, soda and ground ginger in a bowl
4) When the butter mixture is melted pour it into the flour mixture and stir until it makes a stiff dough. You may need to add in a little bit of water to make it come together.
5) If you would like to make a standard ginger bread house here is the template to use.
Cut out each shape of the template and roll out your dough, place your template on the dough and using a knife cut around it. You should have two side walls, a front and back wall and two roof panels.
6) Bake in the oven on baking paper for about 15 minutes until the edges are slightly brown and then leave to cool to firm up. Once cool you may need to trim up the edges again as it tends to loose a little bit of shape in the oven.
7) Using royal Icing in stick together the walls and the roof and decorate with sweets, chocloate or anything you can find suitable.

See below some more ideas of things you can make and do with gingerbread.

How about some cool gingerbread personalised gift tags, yummy!!

You can also make these adorable mini gingerbread houses too that can be used as mini cookies with a cup of tea or mulled wine.

Why not have a gingerbread house decorating party?

We made gingerbread houses for a recent Craftea Birthday party and we split the girls into two groups and had a competition to see who could decorate the gingerbread house the nicest in 5 minutes, it went down a storm as you can image, it was so hard to pick a winner!!

For the smaller kids why not make on of our Craftea Liga Houses using Liga biscuits and royal icing

or make some gingerbread and give it as a gift with a cookie cutter, cute!

So they can make their own gingerbread cookies!!