The Crucial Piping Tip You Need For A Stronger Gingerbread House

For baking enthusiasts, the arrival of the holiday season means warming up the oven for festive fruit cakes, colorful Christmas cookies, and gingerbread for carefully crafted gingerbread houses. Like pumpkin spice around Thanksgiving, gingerbread is a flavor that's popular around Christmastime, with seasonal gingerbread products flying off store shelves. While you may look forward to the fragrant smell of gingerbread filling your kitchen each winter, building a gingerbread house can be challenging. Whatever fun visuals you have in mind can quickly go by the wayside as you helplessly watch the walls cave in or the roof collapse on your family's creation. But by using a star tip to pipe your icing, you can make the gingerbread house building and decorating processes easier and a lot less frustrating.

When it comes time to assemble your house — decorating each piece individually on a flat surface is recommended, and a star-tipped piping bag can be your secret weapon. By using royal icing of a thicker consistency, the star tip creates wide, decorative stripes that give the roof, the walls, and all parts of the house more icing to grip, thereby creating a stronger hold. Using a standard round tip can be a challenge because it provides less frosting to grip and it's harder to keep the icing on a straight line at the edges of each piece.

Royal icing is primarily made with egg whites, powdered sugar, and water and is a favorite ingredient for building and decorating gingerbread houses because it hardens as it dries, effectively turning into glue. The egg whites, in particular, give the frosting a gleam like fresh snow and help it set quickly. With a thicker layer of icing from a star tip, your gingerbread pieces have a stronger foundation with more room to grip from the get-go. The thick stripes of icing can also act as the trim for your gingerbread house, giving it the look of a snow-covered cabin that's decorated with your favorite treats.

Beyond Christmastime goodies, piping has plenty of decorating benefits. Star tips can create a variety of fun shapes and designs (like snowballs in winter) that can help put novice bakers at ease as they try to avoid making mistakes, especially on cakes. So if your kids insist on trying to make something that rivals Disney's massive gingerbread houses, a star-tipped piping bag will help your holiday creation stay upright.