Make Your Own Gingerbread House

At Deni Cole’s house, Christmas comes in August. That’s when she pulls out cookie cutters, cardboard patterns, and stacks of candy boxes to begin work on her annual gingerbread creations.

Gingerbread houses? Oh no, not mere houses. Cole builds Tudor houses. Mansions. Stage sets. Complete worlds of gingerbread and sugar, where gum-paste elves drive candy trains and ice-cream cone evergreens dot the yards.

“You have to be a kid when you make gingerbread,” she says with a warm grin that makes her eyes crinkle. “It brings out the child in all of us.”

Cole, 48, of Weaverville, a western North Carolina town of 2,416, indeed makes competition-level gingerbread houses. She’s entered the annual gingerbread competition in nearby Asheville, N.C., five times in six years, winning first, second, and third prizes. Her houses have been on television’s Good Morning, America and in magazines such as Southern Living.

This is, after all, a woman who once made a gingerbread version of the Mother Goose rhyme, There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, complete with 49 children (made from icing) in the windows. This creation, she says, is her favorite so far.

But for beginning gingerbread bakers, she scaled back to show how to create a basic design—a simple four-walled house with a steep roof. “It’s a child’s pattern,” she says. “They like lots of surface for candy.”

Gingerbread doughs are very forgiving, Cole says. She starts with a 13-quart stainless steel bowl she can put right on the stovetop to melt shortening and honey.

She usually uses rye flour for the color, texture, and low-protein content, but all-purpose flour is fine, she says. She avoids bread flour, because it makes stretchy doughs that shrink when they bake.

She adds extra spices to make the scent linger. Sometimes she even drips oil of cinnamon down chimneys for that extra Christmas touch.

Cole’s background is in commercial food service, but she left a fast-food management job for one where she makes custom cakes for an in-store bakery. “I just decided to make a living doing what I do best,” she says. The self-taught cake decorator handles the detail work such as company logos and personalized cakes.

The best part

Mixing the dough is the toughest part of gingerbread. “I work up a sweat,” Cole admits. She rolls out a large piece of dough and moves it to a baking sheet sprayed with cooking spray. Then she uses a cardboard template and a pizza wheel to cut out walls, trimming most of the excess, but leaving a half-inch border.

Same thing for the doors and windows—she cuts them out, but leaves the dough in place. After baking, she removes the pieces quickly, before they cool and stick.

“Glass” windows are easy: Cole places red Lifesavers in the bottom ones (for a fireplace glow) and yellow Hall’s cough drops in the upper floors. After the walls spend a few minutes back in the oven, she uses a toothpick to coax the melted sugar into the corners. In a few minutes, after the candy cools and hardens, the walls can be popped loose off the cookie sheet.

Cole usually spreads the work out, baking one day and finishing the house on another. “Otherwise, you’re worn out and you’re in no mood to decorate,” she says.

And decorating, she says, is the best part.

She uses meringue powder, available in most craft stores, to make royal icing—a particular kind that spreads easily and hardens quickly. It’s easier to work with—you just mix powder, confectioners’ sugar, and water—and it’s safer than the from-scratch version with uncooked egg whites.

She makes a large batch of white icing, covering the mixing bowl with plastic wrap to keep it from drying, then loads a pastry bag—a soft, cone-shaped bag in which frosting is squeezed through a small decorative tip.

Cole decorates walls before building the house. It’s easier, like drawing on flat paper, and her candy details don’t fall off before the icing dries.

She pipes stars around the candy-glass windows and uses tweezers to top the stars with candy dots.

On the sidewalls, she uses a pencil to sketch more windows. “You can erase, too. Or you can wash it off,” she says. “It’s not food, it’s art.”

After outlining the windows in icing, she adds candles to one, a Christmas tree to another, a stack of presents to a third. The windows are filled with “run icing”—royal icing thinned with corn syrup. Piped around the edges, it spreads to fill the background.

Working steadily, she covers the roof with scallops of icing, lining the two sides up so the design and spacing will be consistent, then places a tiny candy dot at each upstroke.

“I just love doing it,” she says. “I can sit here for hours, with a pair of tweezers. Lamar (her husband) thinks I’m crazy. But it’s very calming.”

Once holly boughs with red-dot berries grow under every window, a peppermint clock marks time at the roof’s peak, and red icing candles glow with tiny flames, Cole puts the house together.

She pipes icing along the bottom of the back wall, stands it on a piece of cardboard, and blocks it up with a can of soup. As she adds each side, she adds more cans, making sure to put the sidewalls inside the front and back walls. Otherwise, the house will be too wide and the roof won’t fit.

‘You do not eat them’

Cole’s gingerbread houses are so sturdy, they usually last until the next summer. Some people try to save gingerbread houses by spraying them with acrylic, but they’ll mold unless they are very dry. Cole prefers to just let them go. She’d rather enjoy them while they last, and then have the fun of making another.

“The one thing about gingerbread is this: People think you eat them. You do not eat them. They’re for display, and who wants to eat them after that?”

Complex designs such as “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater,” and “Peter Rabbit’s House,” a gingerbread tree stump inspired by a stump in her back yard, can take Cole months to design and build. For those kinds of houses, she builds the shape with wads of aluminum foil, then uses an electric knife to cut them into sections that will hold dough.

Then she puts up extra tables in the living room and goes to work, even making her own candy canes from gum paste and a utensil that looks like a tiny caulking gun. “I just get consumed,” she says of the annual gingerbread house competition. “It’s all I can think about.”

With her newest creation standing firm, she adds an almond-rock walkway in front of the door that is just a little open, and billows of white icing to cover the yard. She pipes “snow” on the chimney top and along the roof, always working from bottom to top to get the natural look of piled-up snow.

It’s finished. And yes, it looks good enough to eat.

Deni Cole's Tips For Your Gingerbread House

• Read recipe, instructions, and tips completely before beginning.
• Molasses can be substituted for honey. Dough made with honey hardens after baking. Molasses gives a darker color, but the dough may soften after baking.
• Always place the rolled-out dough on the sheet, and then make your cuts. That keeps the pieces from getting distorted when they’re moved.
• Keep a straight pin by the oven. If the dough begins to bubble, remove the pan from the oven, pop the bubbles, and smooth the dough by rubbing lightly with a potholder. Then return the sheet to the oven.
• Cut the shapes for windows or doors, but leave them in place. Remove them from the baking sheet while the piece is still hot. Press any crumbs back into place while hot.
• Very thin dough, for shingles or other details, needs only about 5 minutes to bake. Cut round shingles using the wide end of a pastry tip.
• If a piece isn’t dry, or seems to bend at room temperature, return it to the oven at 250-300 degrees before decorating. The low temperature will dry it without further browning.

Gingerbread Magic

Many readers who read our story titled "Make Your Own Gingerbread Magic" last month about gingerbread artist Deni Cole of Weaverville, N.C., have asked us to provide her gingerbread recipe.

Gingerbread Dough

• 12 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 tablespoon ground cloves
• 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup lemon juice
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• 2 egg yolks, lightly beaten
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 1/3 cups honey
• 3 1/3 cups sugar

Measure flour into a 9-quart bowl. Remove about 1 cup of the flour and place in a small bowl. Add the ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and salt and stir together well. Add to the large bowl of flour and sift or stir to blend well.

Combine lemon juice, eggs and egg yolks in another bowl and set aside.

In a 13-quart mixing bowl, combine shortening, honey and sugar (in that order). Place over low heat, stirring constantly until shortening and honey are melted and sugar easily can be stirred in. (Sugar doesn’t need to dissolve, just blend; watch carefully to make sure mixture doesn’t burn.) Remove from heat.

Add lemon juice/egg mixture to the sugar mixture while still warm. Stir with a whisk until well-blended.

Begin adding flour mixture to the honey mixture, stirring with a whisk at first. Change to a large, sturdy spoon as dough gets stiffer. Stir in as much as you can, then begin kneading in the remaining flour. The dough will become very stiff. Cover dough with plastic wrap to keep it from drying out.

Dust work surface and rolling pin with more flour. Break off a chunk of dough. (If needed, warm the dough in the microwave for 15 to 30 seconds to make it easier to work with; see note.)

Roll dough to 3/8 inch thick (large or support pieces) or 1/4 inch thick (smaller pieces). Move rolled dough to lightly greased sheet pan and cut, using desired pattern. Remove most of the excess, but leave a 1/2-inch border in place to help pieces hold their shape.

Bake at 350 degrees. Time will vary depending on thickness of dough, 15 minutes for thin pieces and 25 to 30 minutes for thick pieces. Cool, set aside, and decorate.

Note: Don’t refrigerate this dough. It is difficult to roll if it becomes cool. To keep it soft, place it in a covered metal bowl on top of the stove while the oven is on.

Kathleen Purvis is the food editor of The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.

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