Sunday, October 22, 2006

A Gingerbread House. The Story.

I haven’t made a gingerbread house in years and the other day I decided that I wouldn't let another holiday season go by without having some fun with one.
I grabbed some grid paper and sketched out something I though would be fun and challenging (not to mention totally yummy). Yes, Christmas is two months away, but these things take time and planning; besides, the time to buy the candy is after Halloween! I’m looking forward to my little project and thinking about it got me remembering back to long, long ago when Danny and I put our dating relationship to a serious test….

We were young and in love and blissfully unaware of how we were about to butt heads and learn a little bit about how stubborn the other was. We constructed a massive, two-story house with real sugar glass windows, beautiful frost trees, and a gabled roof.
I was the cook and the artist who fully believed that those skills combine was all it took to make a beautiful gingerbread house. Danny was the architect/engineer who believed that I was on a downhill slope without his protractor, grid paper and calculator. We argued over most details. Most of my problem solving Danny found appalling. Have a crooked wall? Add more icing! Chimny too short? Stack some more candies on there. There's no building code here, honey. It's OK if the house is not level.
Well Danny is not one to back down easily and even though we were in the kitchen (my domaine) he gave me a lot of trouble!
It was a real eye opener into our relationship and a good lesson on working together. Probably the hero in the situation was Danny’s mother, who let us take over her kitchen for three days and cover every surface in sugar and dough. The place was a mess. You could almost skate on the sugar that crusted the floor when we were finished. Aye! But most importantly, the house was very impressive. Such fun. I wish I could find a picture….someday.

All that said, I wish to invite you and challenge you to make a gingerbread house this year!

Get inspired! Start small, so it’s not too overwhelming, and have lots of fun. There's lots of great 'How-to' sites online for the beginner or the expert complete with recipes and photos. Here's a site for 'mini houses' made with graham crackers.

http://organizedchristmas.com/article40.html

They used these as place cards at the dinner table. Too cute!

Send me a photo of your complete house and I'll post them all on here to share. HAVE FUN!!!


5 comments:

Amber said...

That's a GREAT idea to start thinking now about a gingerbread house construction project:) I find the Xmas season kind of sneaks up on me so sometimes everything I want to do doesn't get done! I even have a beautiful baking mold for a gingerbread house in AB, so I will have to find it and make one there. Thanks for the inspiration Aimee! Will Noah get to sample your gingerbread house this year?

Amber said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

Right...in all my free time around Xmas ;) I might have to settle for being an understudy on the mother of all gingerbread houses! Yikes!

Aimée said...

You're on, Miranda! You know I love having a shlep/dishwasher/errand runner/babysitter around! Hey, I won't even charge you for the valuable tips and techniques you will learn. ;)
Seriously, if you're just around to help eat it that's fine too.

Anonymous said...

I would just like to point out that the design for the house came from a magazine, and the instructions and templates were VERY, VERY wrong. Like having a 3-sided rectangle for the roof. We needed the calculator, protractor, etc... just to make sure that the roof was big enough to cover the top of the house.

And sure, adding icing will eventually glue all the parts together, but who has to hold the walls together for 10 minutes each while the icing is hardening? Me. That's who, and that's why it seemed to make more sense to me to ensure that the parts fit together.

Adding to the tension of those fateful days, Aimée unbelieveably threw any unused or "ruined" gingerbread IN THE GARBAGE,!!!! No excuse for that.

ShareThis

Blog Widget by LinkWithin