Gingerbread House

This weekend we worked on our Yule gingerbread house, I wanted it to be ready for the Yule Feast we're hosting on the 18th.  Looking forward to sharing the delights of that night with you all!  I still had gingerbread dough in the freezer from the Haunted Gingerbread House I made at Halloween, so got that out of the freezer to defrost in plenty of time.

My SO decided that this was the day to give me an early Christmas present, and handed over a silicone baking mat for rolling out pastry etc. on.  It was perfect timing.  I was able to roll the dough out on the mat, cut out the shapes and then just flip the mat upside down to get the pieces onto the tray without any distortion from trying to lift them.

With the pieces baked, I took a chance on a new technique and used some meringue powder to make the royal icing which I coloured with paste colours in Christmas red and green.  The icing was a completely different texture to regular royal icing but it certainly did the job!

Our big innovation this year was the addition of boiled sugar windows, and a light inside.  You can make windows by putting boiled sweets in when you bake the gingerbread, but as I'm a fan of playing with sugar at high temperature I made my own.  I dissolved a cup of sugar in 1/2 a cup of water over a low heat, added a pinch of cream of tartar and then boiled it to 300 fahrenheit, added a little yellow food colour and poured the mixture into the good gingerbread pieces which I had laid down on a greased granite slab.  20 minutes later we had glazing!

The assembly went smoothly, it takes time but that's really just waiting time to let the icing dry between stages.  I do wish I'd had a smaller nozzle for my piping bag though, it was just a bit too big.  Ah well, it'll soon be Christmas and I have just such a thing on my list!

We added a few pre-bought decorations, and boiled up a bit more sugar to make a pond, stuck them all on and tada.  Very pleased with the result!  Full photos are here.

Haunted Gingerbread House

Last year at Yule we made a gingerbread house, and whilst we were looking on the internet for inspiration I came across some really cool looking haunted gingerbread houses that people had made for Halloween.  So I was determined that in 2009 we would have one of these too.  So here we are, a week prior to our party, and I was ready to make it.  I found the excellent recipe and instructions we'd used to make the house last year (fantastic for first timers!  Although note that this makes enough dough for two houses in my experience.) and then went looking for some sites/blogs or hopefully templates to make our own.  But alas, other than this incredible house, I couldn't find anything that I liked.  Most of the haunted houses turned out to be from a kit (boo!) and in any case didn't quite look like what I wanted.  So I decided to be very brave and make my own.

I started out with a sketch of the house as I wanted it, then made templates so I could do check my measurements.  It looks pretty good I thought, so I went ahead and baked the gingerbread.  The baking part went smoothly (other than losing the corner to one piece) and I soon had some royal icing made and ready to put it all together.  Which is where it went awry!  I hadn't even thought what effect the food colouring would have on the icing, but I can now pass on the lesson that you cannot colour royal icing with regular food colouring.  Apparently you need special gel or paste colours instead.  If you add regular food colouring to the icing it just goes horrendously runny.  I made a second batch of icing, didn't colour it and voila, the house was put together.  Phew!

Day two was decorating day, out came the bags of Halloween sweets and the many packs of writing and coloured icing that we have in the cupboard.  We decorate a few apricots up as Jack-o-Lanterns, propped chocolate skeletons up by past cauldrons and generally had a grand old time decorating the house.  It was a family affair, with my (almost) 3 year old contributing as well as my SO and myself.  Fun!  The jars I'd used to prop up the walls had left some marks on the board, and this encouraged our creativity to find more ideas to put on the board and cover them up.  My personal favourites are the eyes in the cauldron, and the witches legs sticking out from under the house a la Wizard of Oz that my SO made.

The white royal icing was painted over with food colouring to blend it in with the halloween theme, and the imperfections really don't matter on a haunted house in the same way that they do with a Yule one.  We've got a great centerpiece for our Halloween Party food next weekend (so more blogging to come as we create those!)