Decorating a Gingerbread House Before Baking

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Jennifer Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you how to make a gingerbread house to create your own winter wonderland. Now what we are going to do is by using a sharp pearing knife and a spoon we are going to make various marks in the cookie dough to show different textures. So this is a really cool way to make it show as if your house is made out of brick or wood, something different that will give it a lot of interest visually and it is just going to look really neat. So what you are going to do, actually the first thing you can do is take the roof and you can make it have a tiled look by taking the bowl of a spoon and you are going to gently press in the edge just like this. And you are going to keep doing it throughout the entire roof so that it looks like you have got little tiles that are making the structure of the roof. And you want to do it in an off set pattern so that they look as if though they are over lapping just as you would have on a house. So another technique you can do if you want to go to one of your wall pieces and you are going to carefully score the edge with the knife. Now when you're cutting in all of these you do not ever want to go all the way through. You are just lightly scoring the top so that when it bakes you get those lines. So for this one we are going to do bricks. And you also want to have it off set so it looks as though the bricks are stacked on top of each other. Now another thing that you can do is make it look as though your house is made out of wood. And for that it is going to be similar to your brick effect except you are going to be going up and down instead of from side to side. So you are going to have lengthwise lines cut into your dough. And then to make the wood ends you are just going to do random lengths. You don't want them to be to perfect and you don't want them to match up either. Cause like in a house if you have wood in siding or if you are building a house and you have your nice pieces of lumber that are being used it is going to be at odd ends. They are not going to be perfectly aligned with one another. So these are just some of the cool ideas that you can do to decorate your cookie dough before you bake it. "