The Cost of a Real-life Gingerbread House is Revealed
Bake Off is back, bringing just the kind of sugary boost this country needs and it has the mortgage experts at Bankrate UK thinking, ‘what if we could build a gingerbread house in real-life?’
Using an adapted recipe from the baking Queen herself, Mary Berry, along with data on the cost of land in the UK’s major cities, Bankrate UK has uncovered how much it would cost to build your very own 3 bed, semi-detached gingerbread house. Think more biscuits, less bricks.
To build your new home you’ll need the following:
163,500g butter
130,800g dark muscovado sugar
65,400g golden syrup
12,208g ground ginger
872 packets of chocolate buttons and a little imagination.
When building a gingerbread house, it’s good to shop around to get the best bang for your biscuit. If you shop in Asda you’ll bag yourself this house for approximately £3,500. But if you’ve got some extra budget set aside and you’re looking to build something a little more up-market, Ocado will complete your build for £5,160.
The average cost to build a 3-bed semi-detached home in the UK is £213,000. This means it is approximately 98.3% cheaper to build a gingerbread house with Asda or 97.5% less with Ocado.
If gingerbread isn’t your first choice of building material, why not try Kate’s 3D cake house from the simpler times of series 5? We are talking moist pistachio cake walls, laced with blackcurrant ganache, a crisp white roof bejewelled with silver balls and blue fondant bedroom windows.
To replicate this house you will need 145,000g caster sugar, 36,250g pistachios, 174,000g white chocolate, 14,500g ground almonds and 290 packs of silver balls to start. A house like this could cost you almost double Mary Berry’s at £6,400 or £10,000 if you’re going for a luxurious finish. That is approximately 96.9% and 95.2% cheaper than the UK average 3-bed build.
There is no doubt about it, you’ll be Star Baker on any street.
But if that is not enough to satisfy your sweet tooth, why not show off your culinary skills in the garden too with some snowy trees? You will need some of the following: 50,000g plain flour, 200g ground cardamom, 17,500g dark brown sugar and 15,000g honey. Each tree will cost you an extra £420 or £600 for a top of the range spruce.
But where will you build your delicious new digs? As suspected, London is most expensive costing approximately £1,250,000 to buy the land and build. Birmingham on the other hand looks to be more attainable, costing approximately £165,000. Similarly, Cardiff comes in at around £195,000. Not too shabby for a house that doubles up as a snack.
