Pass the Gingerbread House Cookie Cake
Gingerbread houses are great holiday fun, but even the most festive ones aren't usually very inviting as a dessert or snack. They tend to end up dried out and difficult to eat. At The Kitchen, we're taking the fuss out of gingerbread houses and making a version that's easier to assemble and easier to eat! And lucky for us, actress Angela Kinsey and her husband, baker Josh Snyder, stopped by to help us out!
Jason DeCrow
Start with your favorite decorated house cookies. You can buy some from a bakery or specialty store or make your own using our easy decorating tips! We like to use varying house shapes and sizes as well as some snow-capped pine tree cookies.
You have the option of making a 1- or 2-layer cake. We like using a spice cake with white frosting, but you can use whatever box mix or purchased cake you'd like--just make sure it has a plain, white buttercream frosting with no piping or borders.
Use a pastry bag of buttercream to make a T shape on the back of each cookie and adhere them to the outer part of the cake, all the way around. We like to layer trees between houses and use mostly large cookies on the bottom layer and mostly small cookies on the top layer.
After you've arranged your cookies into a village, it's time to add a topper. Jeff Mauro uses a craft or pop stick and some royal icing to glue 2 cookies together with the stick in between, making a double-sided cookie. He uses this same method with a large tree and a small tree and inserts the stick end into the cake so that the houses and trees stand up on the top of the cake.
Once your topper is set, it's time to pipe on some snow drifts. Just fill a pastry bag with buttercream and gently pipe little piles of snow at the base of the houses and trees.
Lastly, we like to make it snow on our gingerbread village. Angela used a shaker of confectioners' sugar to lightly add some fresh snow to the top of the cake.
Happy Holidays!
