Well, I had promised the staff “something with Ginger” as the reward cake for December, but I don’t think they were expecting this!
The windows are isomalt and the signs are royal icing, piped onto grease proof paper the day before assembly.
I delivered this at opening time on New Years day, and I don’t think the staff being hungover did anything to diminish their astonishment. I had, in fact, mentioned my plans to several people so wasn’t quite expecting them to be SO astonished.
For the Gingerbread I adapted a BBC recipe by adding 1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg and a pinch of ground cloves. I felt that this gives a better all around flavour, backing up the ginger. I had come across this by fluke, when making biscuits with the same recipe I found that I only had 1 tsp of ginger in the entire house(!) so added the nutmeg and cloves to make a christmas spiced biscuit instead.
This was the only deviation from the recipe, which you can find here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/gingerbread_men_99096
I used a thick royal icing to stick it together and to pipe the signs with. If I had time I would have let down some of the icing to fill in the signs, as this would have made for a smoother finish.
The most important stage was working out the template. I did this by using the photos of the actual shop (the ones above) and, in powerpoint, created line drawings of each side of the building I wanted, plus the support pieces. Once I had these right I printed several copies, and on each cut out different features. So one copy was just the outline, one was the outline with the windows cut out, and one was all the bits which stuck out. I kept the in between bits to trace the signs onto.
With these I trimmed each piece both before and after baking to make sure they were right. The sooner out of the over the better for trimming as once they firmed up it was very difficult to get a clean cut. I had to us the isomalt filling the windows to keep several of the frames from falling apart, luckily no one noticed.
I cut the windows after baking, this was more forgetfulness than planning. I had been planning to use the more traditional method, of baking with a crushed boiled sweet in the hole, to achieve the windows. In the end though the isomalt was so good that I had to cover the floor of the building with the icing, since the windows were so clear that all the glue holding the building together was very visible.
Sweet Bribery 