How to make a (delicious) gingerbread haunted house for Halloween.
Of course, the gingerbread can just be baked, plain and simple, but if you're up to the challenge, you can become a full-fledged gingerbread mason by making the house walls look like they're made of bricks—the technique isn't difficult at all. Start by wrapping a bench scraper in plastic to dull its edge, then lightly stamp horizontal stripes into the dough and mark each brick end with the blunt handle of a dinner spoon.
There's no real rhyme or reason to my technique; I just brush the gingerbread with a bit of this and that until it looks sufficiently spooky and old. For "mortar," I roughly pipe light-gray royal icing between the bricks, then cover the gingerbread piece with plastic so I can smush it down into the cracks.
Another trick is to thin leftover dough into a gingerbread paste to pipe"planks" with a basketweave tip. After they're baked to a deep, dark brown, they can be secured over the windows with dabs of royal icing, plus a few black dots on the surface for"nails."The archetypal haunted house has a roof that's black as sin, but candy shingles tend to look less creepy than cute. As far as I'm concerned, a pitch-black coating ofis the way to go.