Christmas Chocolate Gingerbread House

My fiancé bought me a gingerbread house kit a couple of months ago as he knew I wanted to make a gingerbread house at Christmas, so giving me the set as a Christmas gift was too late. I used it to make a haunted Halloween gingerbread house but of course was going to make a Christmas one as well, and here it is!

I used the recipe on the back of the box again to make the gingerbread:
180g butter
125g brown sugar
300g golden syrup
500g plain flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp bicarb of soda

Melt the butter in a pan and add the sugar and syrup. Remove from the heat, add the dry ingredients and mix to a thick dough. Roll out on a floured surface and cut out the shapes on top of pieces of baking paper.

I found it impossible to lift the shapes without distorting them after they had been rolled and cut out which is why I did it directly on to the baking paper.

Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes and leave to cool - I had to do this in several batches.

I ran out of golden syrup though and had to use Tate & Lyle's chocolate syrup to make up the quantity, which worked fine and it gave the gingerbread a slightly chocolately flavour which was ideal because I was planning to decorate it with quite a lot of chocolate!

I covered a cake board in white fondant and stuck the walls of the house together while the fondant was still soft, which helped anchor the walls. I stuck each piece together with royal icing (icing sugar mixed with egg white) and for some reason it was easier than last time to keep it stuck together; it didn't take long until the house was dry.

I spread more of the icing on the walls and the roof to fix on the decorations, and put Cadbury's chocolate fingers on the side walls to give a log cabin effect. The thatched roof effect comes from using Nestle's Matchmakers.

I wanted to keep the rest of the decorations fairly plain for a rustic log cabin effect so just made a door for the front from some more chocolate fingers.

I also baked a gingerbread snowman and Christmas tree; I decorated the snowman with some of the white royal icing and used a cocktail stick dipped in gel food colouring to draw on the nose and scarf. I then tinted the rest of the royal icing green and decorated the Christmas tree, and stood them both up in front of the house.

I'm sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as Christmas is the perfect time of year for a gingerbread house!