Edible Type: Making of the Gingerbread House

We decided to run with the ginger bread idea and went with the second recipe. Below show the photographs of our progression.

Here we recreated the net plan I drew out and figured out what size each piece would need to be  in order to have enough mixture for it all. Also it was important to consider how big it was going to be for stability and also  practicality when it came to taking it in to university.

once we had sorted how big the ginger bread house was going to be we laid out the dough and began rolling it.

First time round I rolled the dough to thin so that it was sturdy enough. After that mistake we learnt that the dough needed to be around 5mm thick to be sturdy enough. We measured each piece so that the house would be the same thickness.

Once they were cooked we had to quickly cut around the edges so that they could get there sharp and near edges back.

The ginger bread all laid out. Because we had never done it before we were cautious to keep it in the over for too long and were told it keeps hardening once it is out of the oven. For this reason I think we took them out too early and then they didn't fully harden! Another 2 minutes and a lot of hassle would have been saved.

One thing we didn't think about was how the two 'L' pieces would support themselves. We found as soon as we stood them up they began to crumble in the inner 'L' corner and split into two. We spent ages trying to fix this by coating it in hard icing and then resorting to toffee but the toffee didn't dry well and made it taste disgusting.
Fortunately we created spare squares so we were able to use those to recreate the 'L'.

Royal Icing after it had been left in the fridge provided a really good gluing material.

Our attempts at gluing an 'L' back together!

In the end the house wouldn't support itself so we created a cardboard structure on which the ginger bread could rest. This was measured out using the same sizes as the net plan for the house without the bottom piece. This was a real life saver as tears were close to forming when the house wouldn't stand alone. This was because of a few reasons, firstly the structure was perhaps too big - the 'L's in particular. Then the pieces themselves were not sturdy enough. When we baked the leftover pieces we left them in for slightly longer (mainly because we forgot about them) and they were a lot harder and a lot more like ginger bread. Perhaps because we were too careful with it and we followed the recipe down to the t instead of judging for ourselves when it was ready.