A novel and simple method for gold nanoshell synthesis with controllable core and shell sizes is reported here. A new 'tree-shape' surfactant bis(amidoethyl-carbamoylethyl) octadecylamine (C18N3) was synthesized and used as the glue for the fast combination of gold nanoparticles and the subsequent gold shell outside. The functionalized polystyrene (PS) cores were covered by a surfactant (PS@C18N3) bilayer. The presence of the surfactant double layer played the role of 'glue' in this method, so that upon controlling the amount of surfactant, it was possible to achieve: the manipulation of gold seed density on the PS@C18N3 spheres, the preparation of PS@Au hybrid structures, and a red-shift in the extinction absorption from 520 to 750 nm. Besides, the as-prepared PS@Au composites supported on a glass substrate exhibited excellent effectiveness in the molecular recognition of human-immunoglobulin G (h-IgG) and goat anti-human-immunoglobulin G (goat anti-h-IgG), showing a rapid response within 20 min with a low detection limit of 10 ng ml(-1). This demonstrates that PS@Au prepared and assembled using our method is potentially useful as a nanosensor platform for immunoassay.