December 12th, 2015… I’m rushing to put the finishing touches on my gingerbread mansion – the centerpiece of my annual gingerbread decorating party. It’s the day of the party… and about a hundred people are due over in a few short hours… when disaster strikes. The entire back wall collapsed – taking down the roof, caving in most of the structure.
As I gaped at the mess – two weeks of work, ruined! It hit me. Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. I may be taking this gingerbread obsession a wee bit too far. Too much of my “supermom” identity is wrapped up in these sweet, sticky odes to architecture.
I wouldn’t even have been working on it the day of the party but it really was a dog-ate-my-homework kind of a thing. Two days earlier, our beloved boxer, Cinnamon, got into the room where the baked pieces were drying out. She plowed through a dozen of them (then puked it up, of course). So, I had to re-bake those pieces. Normally I leave them in the garage for two weeks after baking, so they get good and stale: hard like the building materials they are. But it turns out that the re-baked pieces just didn’t have enough time to harden –and that caused the main load-bearing wall to fail.
So, we made the best of it and slapped on a sign that said F5 Tornado zone. It’s kind of an inside joke, because my husband is a meteorologist and storm chaser who runs a company that takes people chasing tornadoes. Everyone had a good laugh, and it even won a prize for funniest entry in the little contest we have at the end of the party each year. You’ve got to have a sense of humor about life’s little calamities.
Our gingerbread party started 21 years ago when I went to a friend’s house and watched her grandchildren decorate a gingerbread house. The holiday smell and the looks of delight on their faces convinced me to try it. That first year I made one very simple house with 6 pieces: two long sides, two tall sides with pointed tops, and two larger roof pieces. It was a hit, so the following year, I made 3 or 4. It got bigger and bigger and now it’s an annual family tradition. Last year I made about 45 small houses, plus the big house. I ply my friends with snacks and we have a dough-rolling party a few weeks ahead of time. Then it’s nonstop baking till they’re all done.
If you want to start your own gingerbread tradition, here are some tips. Find a recipe for construction grade dough on a site like www.gingerbreadexchange.com. You might also download a pattern on that site. Print out two copies of the pattern. Keep one of them for reference, and then cut one of them out to make paper templates for each piece of the house. Then you use those paper pieces to trace sturdier templates onto two sheets of poster board. Mark on them which piece of the house it is (e.g. roof piece A, Side wall B, etc.) Think of them like cookie cutters. Cut out the poster board versions so you have two sets, each containing all the pieces of the house.
Now you are going to use some tape, and build your house out of poster board. It may seem unnecessary, but, particularly if you are going to attempt a complex structure – maybe a Victorian-style house with turrets or porch overhangs, a lot of the pieces look similar and don’t immediately seem like they will come together.
The pattern will give you directions to follow on the best order for constructing the structure. Making it out of poster board allows you to see how the pieces come together to make the whole. It gives you a 3-D version of your finished product: something to shoot for. Plus, it looks cool.
Roll out your dough about 1/3rd of an inch thick into a rectangle directly onto a piece of foil, then place that on a completely flat good-quality cookie sheet. If the sheet is warped, your pieces won’t fit together in the final product. Then place the foil sheet onto the cookie sheet and place your remaining set of poster board pieces onto the dough, a few at a time, leaving an inch of space between each piece. Use a pizza cutter and a smooth knife to cut around the pieces, removing the excess dough, leaving behind what will be baked into the final pieces. If you want to be super-hard core awesome, cut out a space for windows and crush up some clear hard candies. Put the candy bits into the holes and they will bake into a “window”. An alternative to this is to cut the holes for the windows, then once it has cooled, attach a clear gelatin sheet to the inside of the “window” with frosting. The gelatin sheets can be ordered on the internet and even come with a diamond pattern that looks like a fancy window pane.
I usually bake the pieces at 350 degrees for about 14 minutes and then take the foil off of the cookie sheet and place it on a flat surface. Then I re-position the poster board template on top of the piece and cut away any dough that has exceeded the margins. You have to do this within a minute or so, or the dough will harden, crack and break when you try to cut it.
Once all the pieces are baked, leave them in a dry place to harden. You can probably work with it the next day, but I’d leave them there for at least a week.
If you have the patience of a saint, you can use an icing made with meringue powder and powdered sugar to glue the pieces together, following the instructions on the pattern.
As I have 45 houses to make and am a rather impatient type, I use glue guns and hot glue. Go ahead, tell me I’m cheating. It’s an assembly line, and it’s not always pretty. So there.
You need a sturdy base for your house. I use cheap cookie sheets from the dollar store for the small houses, and I have a big piece of plywood cut at Home Depot for the big house.
If you want your house walls to be colored (say, yellow or pink), get a recipe for the type of royal icing used to “flood” cookies and add food dye. I use the highly concentrated color paste sold at craft stores, because the liquid kind can dilute the frosting. You put it into a pastry bag with a round tip and pipe it onto the edges of each piece, then quickly fill it in with lines of icing, one under the other. Then you immediately shake the piece left to right while it is flat on the table. This will cause the icing to form a flat surface. Then leave them to dry over night until they are hard as a rock.
Now you’re ready to build. Glue the side and rear pieces to the board first. You can use a soup can to hold them up until the icing or glue hardens. Put the roof piece on last. If you want a light inside the house be sure to cut a hole in the back big enough for a little battery-operated tea light to be placed inside. Or put a small string of holiday lights inside and thread the plug out the back.
Important tip: Keep the dog away! And don’t put the house(s) in the garage if it looks like rain, or they will absorb the moisture and collapse. One year when I was living on the east coast, I had them on an enclosed porch. I forgot about the humidity and 30 houses collapsed. It was a huge job to re-bake them!
Last comes everyone’s favorite part: the decorating. Decide on your decorating scheme ahead of time and buy candy with an eye to color, durability and weight. You want candy that is relatively light so it doesn’t weigh down the structure. Colored marshmallows and licorice are great. Stay away from anything chocolate, as it will melt in your hands or deform once it touches the icing. M and M’s are fine, because they have a nice candy coating. Think outside the box! Cereal can become roof tiles. Pretzel rods can make the place look like a log cabin. Slivered almonds give the roof a nice look, as do Necco wafers. Certain seeds can be made to look like pavement in a gingerbread village.
Once you’ve got the hang of things, you can enter your creation in the gingerbread contest at the Miramonte Resort in Indian Wells. (Mine won, a few years ago!)
It’s a tradition my kids and nieces have grown up with, and I hope they continue it for their families someday. I hope this little story has inspired you to make some memories of your own.
