Re: eggs vs. no eggs, molasses vs. honey

Unless you are planning to enter a gingerbread competition, or want this house to last for months and months, I don't think that you need to use the honey recipe/lemon juice recipe. It is a very dense dough and requires a lot of effort to mix.

The other person who responded to your post gave the ingredients for a classic gingerbread house recipe. If you just want this house to last through December, this recipe should work out fine. Although, as the other person indicated, if you are in a very humid environment, it is more prone to collapse than the honey recipe. If you search the Wilton site for "Grandma's Gingerbread", you can find the method/instructions for mixing the dough.

Unfortunately, what makes for a good eating cookie (higher ratio of fat to flour, using real butter) doesn't make for good house construction. The honey/lemon juice recipe tastes nasty to me (my personal opinion, although a friend of mine says he prefers its taste to recipes made with corn syrup or molasses). If you want a good-tasting (although probably not as good as your regular cookie) recipe that will still work for house construction, go with Grandma's Gingerbread.

The use of blackstrap vs. light molasses is a matter of personal preference. You are in a minority. Most people are put off by the taste of blackstrap. However, I love to use it for my houses because of the rich brown color it imparts on the dough. I have used "light"/"mild flavor"/"full flavor"/blackstrap inter-changeably and I have never experienced any difference in performance among molasses types.