Christmas Chocolate Gingerbread House

My fiancé bought me a gingerbread house kit a couple of months ago as he knew I wanted to make a gingerbread house at Christmas, so giving me the set as a Christmas gift was too late. I used it to make a haunted Halloween gingerbread house but of course was going to make a Christmas one as well, and here it is!

I used the recipe on the back of the box again to make the gingerbread:
180g butter
125g brown sugar
300g golden syrup
500g plain flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda

Melt the butter in a pan and add the sugar and syrup. Remove from the heat, add the dry ingredients and mix to a thick dough. Roll out on a floured surface and cut out the shapes on top of pieces of baking paper.

I found it impossible to lift the shapes without distorting them after they had been rolled and cut out which is why I did it directly on to the baking paper.

Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes and leave to cool - I had to do this in several batches.

I ran out of golden syrup though and had to use Tate & Lyle's chocolate syrup to make up the quantity, which worked fine and it gave the gingerbread a slightly chocolately flavour which was ideal because I was planning to decorate it with quite a lot of chocolate!

I covered a cake board in white fondant and stuck the walls of the house together while the fondant was still soft, which helped anchor the walls. I stuck each piece together with royal icing (icing sugar mixed with egg white) and for some reason it was easier than last time to keep it stuck together; it didn't take long until the house was dry.

I spread more of the icing on the walls and the roof to fix on the decorations, and put Cadbury's chocolate fingers on the side walls to give a log cabin effect. The thatched roof effect comes from using Nestle's Matchmakers.

I wanted to keep the rest of the decorations fairly plain for a rustic log cabin effect so just made a door for the front from some more chocolate fingers.

I also baked a gingerbread snowman and Christmas tree; I decorated the snowman with some of the white royal icing and used a cocktail stick dipped in gel food colouring to draw on the nose and scarf. I then tinted the rest of the royal icing green and decorated the Christmas tree, and stood them both up in front of the house.

I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as Christmas is the perfect time of year for a gingerbread house!

Christmas Stocking and Snowman Cakes

 

 

I had some chocolate cake mixture left over from making this cake, and wanted to use a Wilton Christmas stocking and snowman mini cake tin I got for only £5 at Cake International in November. 

 

 

 

I only had enough chocolate cake mix to make four cakes, so I did two stockings and two snowmen. You can't really see the detail in this picture but you can see some of the snowman's features on the cake itself, and some of the detail on the stocking.

 

 

As I'd only made four, and since my dad doesn't eat chocolate cake (I took these to my parents' house at the weekend), I quickly whipped up a half batch of plain vanilla sponge as well.

 

 

I forgot to take a photo of these when they came out of the pan!

 

I wanted to decorate them using red, green and white fondant, and to use the different colours to accentuate the details on the cake, rather than cover the whole cake. I did each one slightly differently, focusing on scarves and hats for the snowmen, and trying out different things with the stockings. I used some gold balls and a couple of edible holly decorations I had in the cupboard as well.

 

I made these to use up leftover cake mix rather than to enter a specific blogging challenge but they do fall quite neatly into a few challenges this month. Firstly yet another entry for Alphabakes as our letter this month is S - it's pure coincidence that my Christmas cake tin is shaped like stockings and snowmen!

Laura of Laura Loves Cakes and Rachel at Dolly Bakes have had several entries from me this month as well, as their challenge Calendar Cakes has Christmas as it's theme!

I'm also sending yet another entry to Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Kate of What Kate Baked for Tea Time Treats, as their ingredient this month is chocolate.