Gingerbread Houses

[naomikritzer]

One activity I planned for winter break, which we finally got around to today, was making gingerbread houses. Molly got to do this in preschool, and was very disappointed that she wasn't going to get to do it in kindergarten. Kiera didn't get to do it in preschool, because preschool was cancelled on gingerbread-house-making day. So I bought supplies and we did it at home, which is actually a bit easier than doing it in preschool as you don't have to transport a fragile structure anywhere.

I didn't use a kit for these, nor did I bake actual gingerbread. We used graham crackers for the walls. Kiera's preschool teacher suggested royal icing to hold the thing together, after some hunting through cookbooks, I found a recipe for it. Here's how you make it:

1. Separate an egg. Put the white in a bowl.

2. Gradually add powdered sugar, stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon.

3. When it's smooth but not at all liquidy, stir in a little lemon juice.

We can buy pasteurized eggs, which is convenient. These houses sit out until eaten, and raw egg at room temperature is not usually a good idea. (There are cooked icing recipes that would probably be safer, but I didn't know which would cook up to a good stiffness, so I just used the pasteurized eggs and made the royal icing.)

When Molly made these in preschool, the teacher provided little empty half-pint milk cartons as a base, and they used the icing to glue the graham crackers to the sides. They stay up much better when you do that. I didn't remember to buy milk in little cartons at the grocery store, so we needed to come up with something else. I did, as it happened, have a half-empty bag of stale mini-marshmallows, and a box of toothpicks. So for Kiera's and my houses (of course I made one too, why should kids get all the fun projects?) I strung marshmallows on toothpicks and used these pillars as supports at the corners.

I made a gingerbread A-frame, just because I thought it would be fun, then added a carport. Molly, who had stubbornly refused to let me help her with the toothpick/marshmallow pillars, liked the carport and did one of her own, though it had a lot of trouble staying up. Her house held together really well, despite the lack of structural support. Molly scooped out royal icing and then rolled it out into snakes to hold stuff together.

For decorating, I had a bunch of stuff, some purchased for the project and some salvaged from the back of my cupboards as I was cleaning things out last week. Salvaged items included a jar of store-bought chocolate icing, which we used to stick the candy to the houses. (It wasn't stiff enough to be used as the architectural icing.) I had bought licorice, gumdrops, and Sweet Tarts to be used for decorating houses -- I wanted candies that would provide contrastings textures, to add to the fun of decorating. I also bought two tubes of decorating gel, one for each girl. We had the mini-marshmallows, and I found some other odds and ends while foraging, including a half-finished box of extremely stale Fruity Cheerios (no one ate them because apparently they really don't taste as good as Froot Loops). Oh, and while grocery shopping this week I had indulged one of Kiera's whims and bought her oyster crackers; I used a bunch of oyster crackers to make my gingerbread A-frame a little stone patio. Other salvaged items included a weird blue edible spray-paint stuff (bought for Molly and Kiera's birthday cake this year, but not used), a variety of sprinkles, and four red-and-white striped mints.

Molly made a fence out of gumdrops, and stuck the mints to her roof, declaring them to be fire alarms. I think I mentioned the carport. She put a bunch of stuff on the walls, too. Kiera stuck a lot of stuff on her roof and decorated the her walls with the decorator gels, and then decided that it was more fun to eat marshmallows than decorate with them. (Which is a little surprising because she's hated marshmallows in the past. We tried to get her to eat them while we were camping, and after trying one, she refused to eat any more.)

I separated out strands of licorice and stuck them to the roof of the A-frame, and I tried gumdrops and Sweet Tarts as bricks.

When we were all done I took a bunch of pictures, which I don't yet know how to upload or I'd include them in the entry. (Yes, we have a digital camera now. But it's new, and I haven't really figured out how to use it.)

Comments

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

I've made ginger bread for eating and for houses. The house bread is rolled down thin and has very little leavening in it. Heh, BTW royal icing even if it's made w/un processed eggs will not cause food poisoning, too much sugar and too high a ph level.

Re: Royal Icing, Uncooked Eggs, and Salmonella

[naomikritzer]

Well, typically the salmonella is on the shell, but when I separate eggs, I use the shell to do it. (I tried an egg separator once but it didn't work for me.)

My husband may use this as evidence that he should just go ahead and use unpasteurized eggs to make his hard sauce, though. (He could always bleach the egg and wash it off before cracking it.)

It was a pasteurized egg in any case, so my primary concern was that some other sickness-causing bacteria might start growing if we left it sitting out for days at room temperature. Salmonella and e.coli get most of the press, but the less-serious but still-really-miserable food poisoning bacteria are a lot more common.

[joxn.livejournal.com]

When they get old enough to enjoy Lord of the Rings you can build a scale model of the Battle of Helm's Deep in candy with them.

[naomikritzer]

Oh, holy crap. That is awesome. In a "I hope you're in high school or college, because otherwise you have no excuse for having so much time available for doing something so totally useless" sort of way.