Cost of building a life-sized gingerbread house revealed

Mortgage experts at Bankrate UK have revealed how much it would cost to build life-sized gingerbread houses in some of the UK’s major cities, with London emerging as the priciest.

The mortgage advisor has worked out how much it would cost to make a real house out of gingerbread biscuits – and a three bed, semi-detached one at that – using a Mary Berry recipe.

Using Berry’s recipe, with some data on the cost of land in the UK’s major cities folded in, the recommended ingredients include 163,000g butter, 130,800g dark muscovado sugar, 65,400g golden syrup, 12,208g ground ginger, oh, and 872 packets of chocolate buttons.

The average cost of building a three bed semi-detached house in the UK is £213,000, and while shopping around, Bankrate found that using Asda ingredients you could reduce that price by 98.3% with a gingerbread house that would cost just £3,500 to create.

For those in a higher price bracket, Ocado can provide the same building materials for a little more at £5,160, still 97.5% cheaper than a red brick.

Housing prices vary across different parts of the UK, with the cost of buying land and building property at an average of £1,250,000 in London compared with £280,000 in Newcastle and £165,000 in Birmingham.

But with a house made of biscuits, there’s room to save a pretty penny and a chance to have Christmas all year round, as long as it doesn’t rain.