Ingredients for Making a Gingerbread House

Series Summary

Gingerbread has been pleasing the sweet tooth of children and adults since the 1640's, when it was first invented in Shropshire, England. This ginger flavored cake or cookie is often cut into shapes like gingerbread men, and gingerbread houses, and today is synonymous with winter holidays. During Christmas time, children and their parents often assemble gingerbread houses using a variety of decorations, including frosting, colored sugar, and candy.

In this free video series, our expert will show you how to make and decorate a gingerbread house. This fun Christmas or winter time activity allows the whole family to get involved in making dessert. Learn each easy to follow step for rolling out the gingerbread dough, cutting the shapes for a gingerbread house and gingerbread trees, and baking the gingerbread. You will also get tips on assembling your gingerbread house, and adding frosting and other decorations to complete your candy winter wonderland.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jennifer Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I am going to show you how to make a gingerbread house to create your own winter wonderland. The first thing when making your gingerbread house is your ingredients. For making your gingerbread house of course the most important ingredient is gingerbread dough. Now you can either make your own from scratch or your can also use a mix. Whichever one you prefer is the one you should go with. Whichever one makes you most comfortable. The most important thing when making the gingerbread house is the decoration. Chances are if you are making this a couple of weeks before Christmas you're probably not going to end up eating it anyway, in which case the taste of the gingerbread isn't going to matter much. Of course the smell of it baking will. Besides the gingerbread dough for decoration you will also need some different kinds of nuts. They are great for taking the place of stones and creating walls. You are going to need some colored sugar for sprinkling on top. Also some powdered sugar if you want. Various colors of dye for coloring your royal icing. Royal icing is the best option for icing because it's going to dry to a very solid hard consistency. So this will be great in doing things like holding walls together, also for any of the decorations that you pipe on. You want it to be solid. You don't want to have to worry about it running. You will also maybe some edible glitter to add some sparkle to your house and then various assorted candies for decoration. Pretty much anything that you can find is going to work. We have got some round candies and you also have some chocolate covered and white and green and red colors, some gum drops. Anything that you can thing of or that you can find at the grocery store is probably going to come in handy when decorating your house is because the only limitation is your own imagination. "