How to Make a Gingerbread House Cake

Cream together the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until pale and creamy. Beat in the egg yolk and golden syrup, then sift in the flour and ginger. Bring the dough together into a ball with your hands and wrap in clingfilm. Chill the dough in the fridge for half an hour.

Measure the circumference of your cake to work out how many of each house you need to make. Mine was 56 centimetres so I needed four 6 centimetre wide houses, four 5 centimetres wide and three 4 centimetres wide to reach the whole way around my cake.

Top Tip! Make extras of each size in case of breakages…or in case one falls into your mouth by accident!

Roll out the chilled gingerbread dough to the thickness of a pound coin. Trace the templates onto greaseproof paper, cut them out with scissors and use these to cut your houses out of the dough using a pizza wheel.

Top Tip! Using greaseproof paper as your templates rather than normal paper ensures that they will not stick to the dough, plus you can easily remove them after cutting.

Place the houses on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper and chill them in the fridge for 30 minutes or the freezer for ten minutes before baking in a preheated oven 170 degrees Celsius for eight to ten minutes. When the biscuits start to brown around the edges, remove from the oven and transfer onto a cooling rack to go completely cold.

Arrange the cooled biscuits around the circumference of your cake to check for fit and that you're happy with the arrangement. Try to mix up different heights of houses as well as different widths.

Decorate your biscuits with different coloured Royal icing in piping bags fitted with a medium writer nozzle. Vary the design from house to house with different shaped windows and doors. Give each roof a covering of snow and icicles hanging down.

Top Tip! Royal icing (icing sugar, egg white & lemon) is perfect for this project as it sets hard quickly so you won't smudge your piping. You can buy Royal icing sugar that you simply mix up with water to a stiff but pipeable consistency.

When you have decorated all your houses attach them to the sides of your cake with a blob of Royal icing.

To finish, cover the entire cake board with white Royal icing, using a palette knife to make it stand up in peaks.

Top Tip! To make an even more festive street scene you could add edible or non-edible toppers around your cake. Simply secure them, by pushing them down into the royal icing when it is 'wet'.