However I was determined not to let the occasion slip past yet another year, especially since I had bought all the ingredients and decorations. Instead I rescheduled the bake for Easter. Why should Christmas have all the fun? Stick some mini eggs on it and you've got yourself an Easter gingerbread house.
The recipe and house template are from BBC Good Food. It's easily the largest quantity of dough I have ever handled. It barely fitted in my massive and deep ceramic kitchenaid mixing bowl; no other bowl I owned could contain the dough beast. Goodness knows what you do if you don't own a big stand mixer.
The dough is divided into quarters once you've completed the Olympic task of bringing it all together. Out of curiosity I weighed each quarter and they were roughly 500g each, so that's 2kg of gingerbread dough in total!
I made a few deviations from the recipe including subbing out some of the mixed spice in favour of cinnamon, using a mixture of brown sugars (I fancied adding some dark sugar), resting the dough in the fridge for half an hour before rolling out my shapes, rolling out the dough between sheets of grease proof paper and using a boiled sugar/caramel to stick the house together as it sets quicker than royal icing.
I also didn't fancy cutting out gingerbread tiles for the roof as I wanted to use white chocolate buttons (which, coincidentally and impressively, I had exactly the right number of for sticking to the roof.) This left me with a lot of left over dough which I turned into biscuits using my Spring themed cutters: flowers, hearts, bunnies and chicks. The bunnies are my favourite, they looked adorable.
The finished house is perhaps a bit rough and ready and my piping could certainly be a lot neater but I'm really pleased with my first attempt. I think piping/decorating the sections before assembly would result in neater piping, so that's something to bear in mind if/when I make another one. I would also reduce the quantities for just making a house which would make the dough a more manageable size. As you can below, my left overs created a big tin full of biscuits.
However I doubt I'll ever recreate this at Christmas time as it was so labour and time intensive. It was good fun but basically took up a whole weekend: one afternoon baking, one afternoon decorating. In a funny way I think it was actually a better idea to make in Spring, more chilled as I had less other obligations. Maybe I'll do a gingerbread summer house next!
Almost forgot to mention that the gingerbread tasted lovely - a classic soft gingerbread, rather than a crisp biscuit. Thank goodness it tasted good after all that effort!