Gingerbread House

My Norwegian friend turned up yesterday with some friggin' surprise in store: a backpack full of gingerbread dough and a wee set of architectural plans. A few years ago she gave me a gingerbread house, admonishing me not to eat it until Epiphany, as is the done thing in good gingerbread-eating lands. So this year we have our own little chalet that we are to admire, with the eyes only, until the 6th of January. Tambo has already questioned whether we need to wait that long, only to be threatened with (unspecified) 'bad luck'.

So, we bagan with the dough and the wee plans. My friend has kindly translated the recipe she uses--here it is:

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar
2/3 cup syrup (Americans, use corn syrup)
1 1/2 teaspoons ginger
2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp ground cloves
2 tsp ground cardamom
1/2 tsp ground pepper
2 tsp baking soda
150g butter
1 egg
500g plain (all-purpose) flour

Heat the syrup in a pan with the sugar and spices until everything has melted. Add the butter and allow it to melt too. In a bowl mix flour, baking soda, and egg, and then add the syrup mixture to this. Let the dough cool overnight in the fridge. Roll out and cut into shapes. Bake at 170°C (350°F) for 10 minutes.

The shapes that we rolled it into were dictated by these plans drawn up by a cute little architect with a waistcoat made of sugar and a marshmallow moustache...just kidding, my friend scaled some from her secret Norwegian gingerbread book.

Then the rolling and cutting began.

Chimney construction*:

Window cutting (cut details out on the baking sheet, that way you don't have to move the dough any more than necessary):

In and out of the oven went the component dough parts until we had the makings of a house.
Once the parts had cooled came the tricky part: decoration. The icing with which one details the architectural elements of the house is easy to make.

Icing:
240g icing (confectioners) sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
the white of one egg

Whip together the sugar and egg white, adding the lemon juice. Whisk until little peaks form, but no more. Here is the tricky part: in order to ice your house, you need to be able to pipe this icing out of a little pastry bag made out of baking (parchment) paper. I defer here to the experts at Fante's, who have an excellent explanation of how to do this here. I would recommend though, that unlike in the illustration, you cut only the tiniest hole in the bag--you want to be able to do some precision detailing here--pinholes only please.


The Stavanger Aftenblad, a Norwegian newspaper (English edition here), has a yearly gingerbread house contest, the results of which are posted here--an assortment of amateur and professional, collaborative, lone-wolf, conventional, looney. We used these for inspiration and sent Tambo out for flat candy/sweet elements.

Well, finally came the time for the raising of the gingerbread house. A note to the uninitiated: this is hard. The mortar that one uses to keep the whole thing together is cararmelized sugar, which, when in contact with, say, a finger, not only burns, but also sticks to the finger so as to keep burning. Anyway, be careful. In a pan, heat 1/4 cup or so white sugar until it just begins to brown. (If this makes you nervous, add a little bit of water to it first and wait for this to reduce down, keeping an eagle eye on it so that it doesn't burn.) When it gets a wee bit brown, start moving as fast as you can. Dip the component parts of the house into the sugar and stick them together. Think carefully about this before you do it. Speak with your friends about how you will do this--side first, front, back, sweat sweat, rooves...as Tambo said, it's the white-water rafting of baking.

So here is our house. As we speak it is filling the living room with its lovely smell. Maybe in the gingerbread house it smells like our house; dog and cooking.

With the leftover dough we made some cookies. Since it was getting late, we did some quick decoration. An assortment follows; one lazy heart, a 'rude word'--'bum', and a little patriotic something (the Norwegian flag is just out of the frame, but there was one).

___________________________________________________________________
*The astute of you will notice that our house has no chimney. The sharp-eyed will notice that some of the roof decoration has been squashed, too--testaments to difficulties in assemblage. I ate the chimney before I went to bed--it was lovely.