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I'm making a custom gingerbread house this year. I've just finished a cardboard template so can work out the surface area. And I'm aiming for 4mm thick, so I know my target volume. But I can't find any recipe that gives the yield in a sensible form. But that I mean what volume of gingerbread I get for a given weight of flour.

Many recipes attempt, and fail, to give an idea of how big a house they make, but always in a thoroughly unhelpful way: "small" - meaningless; "7x10 inches" - no indication of which 2 of the 3 dimensions that refers to, let alone what shape, and you need much more for some designs than others; "or about 20 cookies" - doesn't specify the size/shape of cutter; etc. Last year I ended up with far too much, which either means lots of wastage or lots of extra time spent baking biscuits I didn't really want.

So, for a given weight* of flour, how much gingerbread can I expect to obtain?

* I will never measure dry baking ingredients by volume, but in this case I have even searched recipes that measure flour in cups.

Chris H
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1 Answers1

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You are not the first baker stumbling about the unpredictable yield issue. There’s even one baker - Stella Parks of Serious Eats fame - that addresses exactly that in her article on construction gingerbread.

Her recipe is designed for one half-sheet pan at a thickness of 3/16 inches, which is roughly equal to your 4mm.

For 175g flour plus another roughly 220g of other ingredients, she gets 1000cm2 of dough.

And we have at least one example of a project based on that recipe on the network, namely Catija’s Eliza Doolots Hat from a Winter Bash a few years back.

Stephie
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