Equipment for Making a Gingerbread House

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. Our next step for the gingerbread house is to go over the equipment that you will need. Some of it is more specialized and other of it is stuff that you should already have and you can always make substitutions. So first of all you are going to need some wax paper and the wax paper will become quite useful for rolling out your cookie dough. Unless you have a silicone surface in which to roll things out on or you have a nice pastry board I recommend covering your counter with wax paper and then just rolling everything out on that. It makes clean up really easy and it also ensures that nothing is going to stick. You will also need some aluminum foil. But I will get into that reason in just a moment. You will need a rolling pin for rolling out your cookie dough. And then most importantly of course you will need your house cookie cutters. Now you can go about this in two different ways. You can either get special cookie cutters for making the different parts of the house. We have the side, a roof and the then other side of your house. You will also perhaps want some trees for background. So it's not just a house, you have some trees in the background as well. Now these are special three dimensional cookie cutters which you can find at kitchen supply stores. But you can also just cut out your own. It's very easy, just use tracing paper to measure out the dimensions of your house and then cut it out onto cardboard and you can use the cardboard to cut out your dough. Use it as a stencil for cutting it out. You can do that and that will cost you absolutely nothing. You will also need for decorating, at least one pastry bag and then a coupler and some tips. The elaborateness of it is totally up to you. Your comfort level in decorating various things. You can also if you don't want to use the tips for decorating but you still want you need have frosting piped onto the edges to hold your house together you can put it in a plastic bag and just snip the edge off and use that for piping your frosting out. It's very simple easy, cheap way of doing it without getting all of the specialized equipment. And then the reason that you are going to need the foil is because you are going to need a surface to put your gingerbread houses on. I am going to use a cutting board which I have flipped over onto a smooth side instead of the cutting side on the other side. You can either use a large cutting board, you can also use some really heavy cardboard but regardless you are going to want to cover it in aluminum foil both to protect the surface and to give yourself a nice smooth surface to work on."