A Very Haunted Gingerbread Manor

It's officially the spookiest time of year! This year we knew we wanted to make some crafts for the Halloween season, and decided to go big with a Haunted Gingerbread House. We intended to have a tutorial for this project, but it ended up requiring a lot of improvisation and was such a commitment (it took almost a week to complete) that we doubt anyone would choose to, or in fact be able to follow our tutorial. Instead we thought we would walk you through the process visually. So off we go!

First James imagined up and sketched a design for what he wanted our haunted house to look like. It is strongly influenced by the Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris, which James visited often as a child. We then discussed a strategy for how to realise this design in a structurally viable way. Our result is seen at the left of the sketch.

In order to be as precise as possible, I made templates. Each was carefully measured in inches, labeled, and later cut to size.

Once the design was finalised, I turned to my dough. I had actually whipped up a batch of dough a few days prior, wrapped it in plastic wrap, and left it chilling in the fridge. Since our gingerbread was not intended for eating, this was no problem. I cut the dough into thirds, and worked with one third while the other two remained in the fridge. gingerbread dough is so much easier to roll out, cut, and bake when its cold!

I used the templates I had prepared earlier to cut out the pieces I needed for our house. Despite my precision, I failed to chill the pieces before baking them so they were a little wonkier than was ideal!

I always overcook my gingerbread when I'm building with it. I never eat my gingerbread houses (I make cookies to be eaten instead) so it is no problem that the pieces are essentially burnt and rock hard. The firmer the pieces are, they better they stand! We let these cool, and then prepared to begin construction.

For icing, I used a special concoction of egg whites mixed with a heinous amount of powdered sugar. While it took what felt like a lifetime to make, this sugary glue was essential for building a multi-tiered gingerbread manor.

We started with the base structure. James held the walls together while I iced them to the chopping board and to each other. The final wall of our house was dropped and broke into two. We quickly piped it and hoped for the best before attaching it to the rest of the house. It ended up staying together nicely, and added some authentic character to our mansion, as is visible below. The walls weren't as uniform as expected, so we had to fill in some gaps with icing. After about a minute we let go and moved onto the roof.

We had to trim some of the edges to make the slanted 'wings' fit together. We iced them down one at a time, and James carefully added toothpicks as supports. We added the 'hat' to the main roof, then constructed the smaller one. We left these three pieces to set overnight to ensure their structural integrity before stacking them.

The next morning it was time to stack. We found something (in our case, part of a cocktail shaker set) that was the exact height of our house walls, and placed it inside the walls to act as a support for the roof. While the house probably would have stood without this, we didn't want to risk it. I iced the flat bottom of the shaker, and the tops of the walls, and we gentle lowered the roof onto it.

We then had to build our tower. Following the same method as before, James held the pieces in place while I piped icing onto the bottoms and sides of pieces. I also filled in the gaps between the side walls and the front, as they didn't quiet meet up. We let this sit for 6 hours, to ensure it had set properly.

In the mean time, James got to work decorating. Using a separate mixture of black icing, James piped on roof tiles. This icing was a little runny and bled a bit, but as the house is dilapidated, we decided it was ok for it to look imperfect! James also piped a line of our construction icing onto the roofs of the main structure and the tower, and stuck painted toothpick ends in to add spooky flair.

After the 6 hours were up, we secured the tower roof to the tower walls with icing, and left it to set overnight.

The following morning, we set to work on the rest of the decorations and embellishments. We attached a porch and shutters, built a fence, added a pumpkin patch and a graveyard, paved a path to the front door, and posted a BEWARE sign for good measure.

We added candy cane porch posts and pink window frames to indicate that our haunted mansion was once a stylish Victorian abode. James got very creative, adding creeping vines, cracks, grass, and a spooky surprise at the back of the building.