Curly Wurlys make great fences.

As it's coming up to Christmas, it seems appropriate to encourage Gingerbread house making. As well as gingerbread house eating. Eating of all kinds really... 


Gingerbread houses can get a bit fiddly, but the great thing about making a gingerbread house compared to making a real house, is when it goes a bit wrong you can eat the evidence. Mmmm. Edible brick.


Make them for your friends to eat or to live in. It all depends on your friends. 


Here are some I made earlier... (Blue Peter styleee)

Making the actual gingerbread is probably the least fun part of the whole process, but its not hard. I can't remember the actual recipe I used for these two, but I seem to remember it was a bit rock solid anyway so no big loss... Mind you, there's nothing wrong with licking the icing and sweets off some rock solid gingerbread so I wouldn't worry toooo much. It's all about the aesthetics with this. 

There are loads of recipes for ginger bread around (I found this one on bbcgoodfood.com) so I'd say just wap it into google innit. 

250g unsalted butter

200g dark muscovado sugar

7 tbsp golden syrup

600g plain flour

2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

4 tsp ground ginger

Melt the butter, sugar and golden syrup together and pour this into the dry ingredients and mix to get a slammin dough. Add a little water if you need to/want to. Roll it out with a rolling pin (or bottle of wine), but remember we're going to be building with it so leave it quite thick (the bbc says thickness of two pound coins ooooh). Cut out your templates (see comments below) and bake in a hot oven (200 degrees C) for about 12 minutes. Or until they've firmed up and slightly brown around the edges. Then let cool and construct!

Templates: These can be as simple or as elaborate as you want. Anything from two rectangles and two triangles to a load of tiny pieces to make a whole castle. You know your time and patience better than me. What I would say, though, is make paper templates first and check they fit together before cutting them out of your dough. The dough can change shape a little in the oven too so don't be upset if that happens. That's what the icing is for. 

The icing: I usually just go for a standard water icing (icing sugar with a bit of water...), but make sure it's quite stiff. No-one likes dribbly cement. 

The last part is the fun bit. Eat Add the sweets. Curly-wurly's make great fences. 

Sugar high 'r' us.