The house that Jack built

Except that Jack didn't build it.  Jolais, Noah and I, however, had lots of fun constructing and decorating houses with the gingerbread we'd made.

The first step towards construction is making the icing glue.  It's a very simple combination of icing (confectioner's) sugar, egg white and cream of tartar.  We used half a pound of icing sugar, 1-2 egg whites, and 1/2 tsp cream of tartar, beaten together till thick and smooth.

It helps to have two people for constructing the house.  Jolais and I worked together, one of us applying the icing glue and the other holding the wall and roof pieces steady.  Once all the gingerbread pieces are glued, you need to leave the house for a couple of hours so the glue can dry and set.

Okay, now comes the fun part: going crazy with candies.  You can only use the perfect candies to decorate, of course, so all the broken bits or misshapen ones have to be eaten.  Oh and it's also a rule that you can only decorate in even numbers.  So if you have an odd number of some types of candy, you must eat one in order to make it even.  And if the icing glue accidentally gets on top of a candy, it obviously spoils the effect so those should be disposed of similarly.  Ideally, you should have bought double the amount of candy you will actually end up using on your gingerbread house, to allow for accidents and odd numbers and unforeseen circumstances ...

You'll need plenty of icing glue, enough to daub the underside of all the candies, draw the outlines of windows and doors (use a forcing bag for this), and liberally reseal any roof or wall seals.  Then just go wild with decorating, and enjoy the end results!

Gingerbread

So it appears I have a misconception about Americans.  (Another misconception?!)  All this time I thought America was the land of homemade gingerbread - real gingerbread, as in gingerbread house gingerbread. A couple of years ago I made gingerbread houses with my class, using a recipe I found online.  The houses were a definite success, since you can't go wrong with large amounts of candy, but I wasn't hugely thrilled about the gingerbread itself; the dough was too dry and brittle, and I had to add milk before it would cloy together well.

This time, I decided to haunt Facebook for the annual Christmas-themed gingerbread house photos, and ask around for the best recipe people used this year.  And here's where the misconception comes in: I was wrong about Americans and homemade gingerbread.  Everybody used a kit!  Okay, well, "everybody" as in all my Facebook friends who happened to post pictures of their children decorating gingerbread houses.  If you don't come under that category, you're excused.  If you come under that category and you didn't use a kit, excuse me!

Anyway, I decided to play with a different gingerbread recipe and, if it worked out better, blog about it so that anyone who happens to drop in and who might also be interested in making homemade gingerbread can pick up some pointers.  That's fairly unlikely, so let's say I'm really just trying on a Julie Powell here.

Recipe: 
(This makes a gargantuan amount of gingerbread, so you might want to halve it if you're baking just for one child, or even two kids; we made enough for five small houses.)
1 cup softened butter
1 3/4 cup dark brown (muscovado) sugar
1 1/4 cup white sugar
2 Tblsps molasses
6 eggs
6 cups flour (and more for dusting)
2 tsps baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
1 Tblsp ginger
2 tsps cinnamon

Cream butter and sugars, adding in molasses and eggs and beating till well combined.  Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then stir into batter.  When mixed, empty onto floured surface and knead till smooth, adding more flour if necessary.  The dough should come together easily, feel soft under your hands and look like this:

Now wrap it in clingfilm / seramwrap and chill it for about an hour, or as long as you like really.  Take it out and roll in on a well-floured surface, making sure to flour your rolling pin also as the dough may be sticky.

When the dough is about 1/4 inch thick, cut out the walls and roof sections of your gingerbread house.  We drew paper patterns beforehand and cut around them with a knife.

Carefully lift your pieces onto a flat baking sheet and bake them in a preheated oven at 325F / 170C for about 10 minutes till dark golden.  They will rise rather alarmingly during the first five minutes of cooking, but will settle again by the time they are finished.

At this point it's important that each piece is laid flat, uncovered, to harden and cool.  Later, they can be stored in an airtight container, ready for the next stage: constructing the gingerbread house with icing glue.  That will be the subject of my next post!

To build a fire ...

That is the title of a short story by Jack London, and it's also one of my goals this afternoon: a rather unsuccessful goal at the moment as all my attempts so far have gone up in smoke.  Haha.  Anyway, they've dwindled into literal ashes and I am still freezing cold after having pressure-washed a relatively small area of the concrete outside our house.  If you're wondering whether this is an attempt to make you feel sorry for me, you're probably right ... I could do with all the pity that's on offer right now!  :D  Just kidding.  So I need some fire building advice.  Jon's much better than I am at making fires, but he's off on a nine mile run right now so that's no help.  Ripple and Turko, out in the garage, aren't going to make this any easier either.  My father in law says (all the way from California) "It's a matter of progressive sizes of kindling, my dear."  That is as maybe, but it still isn't helping me ... and pfffftttt, another try at the fire goes out.  Aaaaaggggghhhhh!!!! ... and soon my fingers will be frozen to the keyboard so I won't be able to


Decided to turn the electric heater on instead.

First Blog Post

This is my first attempt at writing a blog.  I'm planning to write a proper blog if we end up getting our Declaration for adoption, but so far this is just an experiment and a learning process (thanks to my teacher Mr Joseph Berg).

So I'll update this every now and then, and yous can all let me know if it appears to work properly!