Gingerbread part 2

Last year I bought a gingerbread house making kit with the cutters in the shapes of the pieces of the house. Jove I had a lot of fun putting together and decorating our gingerbread house over a few days. We visited the gingerbread houses on display at the Botanical Garden and read stories about gingerbread to get inspired.

I used a recipe that makes enough gingerbread for the whole thing and there were enough scraps to fashion a donkey and a giraffe for the yard, as well as a few fir trees and an angel.

The icing (glue) is made with an uncooked egg white, two cups of confectioner's sugar and 3/4 teaspoon Cream of Tartar. I used the mixer and it makes the icing viscous enough to be used as glue. I loaded the icing into pastry bags and Jove squeezed icing onto the pieces of gingerbread. He would use the back of a spoon to spread it out and then push candy pieces into it. The icing is also used to get the sides of the house to stick together and to stick to the base. I made about 7 or 8 batches of icing.

Jove could do almost all of the work: decorating the sides of the house and smaller pieces, putting up the lawn ornaments and designing the layout.

Our gingerbread house's details:

• two gingerbread people inside eating at a table
• a bunch of hay in the yard for animals to eat and sleep on
• a marshmallow snowman peaking in through the window
• a chimney flanked by an angel on one side and a star on the other.
• rows of gummy bears in the snow lined up for school
• a shed for the animals made from animal crackers

Now, the gingerbread house is gone, after being disassembled by Jove with a pair of pliers. But it will live on in our memory and I am sure I will be finding small pieces of dried icing in my house for many more weeks.