Anya and Dan's Gingerbread House for Christmas 2018

This year my teenage niece Anya and I decided we wanted to make a gingerbread house. We didn't have much experience, I think I'm a somewhat competent baker and recalled making a gingerbread house with my sister when I was young so I knew the basic principles, but we were basically learning as we went. It turned out to be a pretty involved project (it ballooned out to consume several days), but I found it rewarding and had fun collaborating on something creative with my niece (although there were some frustrations along the way).

After consulting some photo references of Victorian-style houses that she liked and with some input from me about what I thought would be feasible, Anya sketched up a pretty cool looking house for use to use as our starting point.

Since we knew that this would be a pretty elaborate design we decided to do a trial run with a simple design, in order to practice making the gingerbread and icing (we used this recipe since it was near the top when I searched for “how to make a gingerbread house” -- I think the recipe worked well, it was easy to follow and I like the taste of what we got), practice drawing and constructing templates for parts and cutting the gingerbread to match, and testing out some of our design features to see if they'd work in the bigger project. We got a cute little house out of it:

With that experience under our belts we felt like we could take a shot at the more ambitious design – we thought there was a pretty good chance we could do it, although we kept in mind that the whole thing might end in disaster to guard against getting our hopes too high in case it didn't work out. Using the sketch as our baseline we started drawing out the full plans on cardstock so we could cut them directly into template pieces. After we had already put together the templates for the front panel and the sides of the tower I realized that the octagonal tower and its roof intersected with the roof of the house-shaped part of the house, and the geometry of that was far more complex than I felt I could visualize so we created a cardboard mockup to figure out those crazy angles (I think I got a brief taste of what a Cthulhu Mythos investigator goes through when they have a “these alien angles are wrong!” experience). Creating the templates took a lot longer than we expected, partly because we were trying to finalize the design and get precise templates drawn as part of the same process.

We finished up the templates:

And baked them into gingerbread:

We made a base out of cardboard and wax paper and started putting the parts together with royal icing.

We also put in a Christmas tree in the upper tower room. We had originally planned on basic assembly and decorative stuff to happen on different days so we didn't have a fully realized plan for how to make a Christmas tree or a lot of materials to work with. Our first attempt was to try to build one up out of royal icing with green food coloring. I forgot to snap a picture, but it looked sort of like this before we decided we needed a different approach:

Instead we built one up out of big green gumdrops and some of the green icing.

The octagonal tower proved to be a bit of a problem – the gingerbread tends to expand a bit while baking and I probably didn't roll all of the sheets thin enough, and those variations relative to the plan mattered most when it came to the tower because it was most dependent on things being spaced properly. At this point in the process I was concerned that trying to trim the gingerbread to get the parts “back on spec” would cause too much breakage (plus the templates didn't all release cleanly from the dough making them hard to work with). Also, I had to make a second batch of icing and we ran low on powdered sugar so I wasn't confident that it would work properly. But regardless of the issues it still came out reasonably well.

Then we decorated it with icing and candy. Here are a bunch of wide shots of the final product:

And here's a video I took with my iPhone trying to provide a 360 look at it:

And some close-ups of the various features:

And I'll close things out with some high-angle shots:

Overall it was a lot of time and effort, but the combination of Christmas spirit and the opportunity to build something cool with my niece made the whole thing feel worthwhile to me. We learned a lot in the process, things definitely would have gone more smoothly if I knew then what I know now (for example, trimming the gingerbread for the octagonal tower probably would have been just fine and made our lives easier). But I think the results are pretty good given that we were basically novices when we started. Merry Christmas!