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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.

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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.

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  • Mental arithmetic says I'd need to scale that up, but not by much - which also feels right given that the parts for last year's simpler house didn't fit on one sheet of roughly the same size. And with the source being Serious Eats, who actually weigh ingredients, I'm not at the mercy of differences in scooping flour. Thanks
    – Chris H
    Commented Dec 2, 2023 at 17:34
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    I’d love to see pictures of the completed house. Sharing the progress would also fit nicely in the Frying Pan. Just saying… (cue begging eyes).
    – Stephie ♦
    Commented Dec 2, 2023 at 17:43
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    The real thing isn't going to happen for another couple of weeks, but then I'll share
    – Chris H
    Commented Dec 2, 2023 at 19:25

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