Gingerbread House

For some years now I have made my own gingerbread house from scratch and it has become a little Chrismas-tradition for me. I just sit down and start drawing on some ideas and when I am satisfied with one idea I start to make the paper templates for it. In the following pictures you can see how my templates looked like and I have noted the real measurements for them on the papers too.
I made several styles this year but I kept coming back to the idea of a house with wrong proportions and oblique angles.
Here in Sweden you cna buy ready made gingerbread dough and I always buy. If you have the opportunity I recommend you to buy the dough because it is quite time consuming but if you want to you can always make it yourself. Just be aware that the dough needs to rest for a day in the refrigerator before you start making your house.

When all your house parts are baked and you have let them cool so they are hard, it is time to put them all together. For this I melted ordinary white sugar in a frying pan. Be careful with this sugar because it gets very hot very fast! When the sugar has melted you can put the frying pan on a trivet while you dip the house parts into the sugar and quickly put the parts together. The sugar solidifies quickly on the houseparts so work fast. The sugar will get cooled down in the frying pan while you work but don't worry, you can always put the frying pan back on the stove burner and the sugar will melt agian. When you are finished with your house you can boil water and gently stirr it into the cooled sugar, put it on the stove burner and the sugar will dissolve in the water after a while, remember to stirr well.

If you think it is a bit scary with this hot sugar you can just skip it and put all parts together with the icing instead. Here is the recipe for the icing I made:

Icing 

4 deciliter icing sugar

1 egg white

1 tablespoon juice from lemon

Mix the ingredients with a electric beater until it gets stiff.

Put the icing in a piping bag or do your own piping bag by using a plastic bag and after filling it with icing you cut a small hole in one corner.