Gingerbread house; Daring Bakers
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow..
Can you believe it is only two days till christmas?? I’ve been running around all day doing last minute errands and not trying to be overrun by the crazy shopping crowd… I am so happy I will not have to go shopping tomorrow as that must be the worst day of the year! Carloads full of food are being carried from supermarkets to houses… and well, we’re not an exception in that, but it still amazes me every year. In the midst of all the christmas preparations I was doing the final touchup and decorating of the Daring Bakers challenge for this month; a gingerbread house!
The December 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to you by Anna of Very Small Anna and Y of Lemonpi. They chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ everywhere to bake and assemble a gingerbread house from scratch. They chose recipes from Good Housekeeping and from The Great Scandinavian Baking Book as the challenge recipes.
Gingerbread house
When reading about the challenge for the very first time I was all excited! I had never attempted to make a gingerbread house and it seemed pretty straightforward.. Pay attention here to the word ‘seemed’… I started out fine; I mixed the dough using the instructions from Y’s recipe (we got to pick from two different recipes) and put the dough in the fridge for about 5 hours I think it must have been. Imagine my surprise when I took it out of the fridge and it was like a brick! Solid and hard. If you pressed it, it crumbled and fell apart… Literally fell apart. Needless to say that rolling it out with a rolling pin was out of the question, but it was so hard that I even had trouble breaking of a bit so that I could flatten it. I had to use a knife to cut the balls (I made several smaller balls rather then one large one) in two. I then had to smash and bang the dough into submission… And when I say smash and bang, I mean smash and bang!! I was pounding my fists on it to get it to behave a little bit better and then once it was pressed into crumbs I had to mold it all together into one piece. So here I was smashing the dough to pieces and then pressing it ‘gently’ all together to form some sort of shape. The first side of the house took me about half an hour to prepare for the oven! It was quicker to bake then it was to mould it!
Dough finally shaped
I was convinced I must have done something wrong, but upon checking the forums it turns out that I was definitely not the only one with the issue. I also have a feeling that the cup/gram conversion did not work too well. The recipe stated to use 5 cups equalling 875 gr of flour, but when I recalculated (too late I might add!) with a different converter it said that 5 cups would be 700 gr. And that is quite a considerable difference in volume needed and might explain at least party of the dryness, although some people had the problem while adjusting the flour to be less. I really don’t know, but let’s just say that this is not a recipe I will ever be making again. I came across some other recipes that look more promising so I might be trying those out some time in the future. For this challenge there really was no time to do it again, so I just went with it and smashed the living daylights out of the dough. As you can see it – at some point – got together and while my walls and roof where quite bumby they did stay together, wit the exception of one piece of the wall which cracked. I just glued it back together with royal icing.
Because the whole baking part took so long I didn’t have time to glue anything together that night, so I had to wait until the next day to start assembling the bits and pieces. Because of the wonky-ness of the walls and the roofs it was quite hard to put it all together and at first I was a bit too impatient and figured I could just add the roof on top while the walls where still drying… NOT a good idea I can tell you. Thankfully nothing broke and I just attached the roofs after the walls had been drying for a couple of hours.
Assembling the pieces
I just a template from Martha Stewart but because she only included the inch measurements for the roof pieces and I was quite frankly a little bit too lazy to look it up, I just used two halves of an A4 sheet to measure the rooftop which turned out to be less then accurate… 
So when assembling the house and putting the roof up; I noticed I had quite a large gap where the two roofhalves did not line up at all. O well, I covered most of it with royal icing and then just covered it with chocolates to conceal the crime..
I wanted to decorate with all sorts of fancy christmas candy, but – guess what – the store was all out of christmas sweets, so I had to do with whatever was left over. If only I had know! I came across a large collection of christmas chocolates this morning, but didn’t bring them as I figured I wanted to buy them at the supermarket to save the amount of shops I had to stand in line for. O well, I think that all things considering it doesn’t actually look all that bad. I think it’s kind of cute, don’t you?
Tastewise it is really not the best and quite unedible, so it’s going to live a long life, since we’re not gonna eat it. Maybe eventually the candy will be picked off and eaten, but the gingerbread itself it quite boring.
So all in all, I loved the challenge and had fun putting the house together, but the recipe itself was terrible. Both in terms of taste as well as in terms of the quality of the dough (I think that dough is even too good a name for this; crumbs is more like it) Because of my obvious dislike of this recipe, I will not be giving it to you , but instead I hereby promiss that I will make another gingerbread house with another recipe and see how that compairs to this one!
Appetizer
Asian
Bread
Breakfast
Desserts & other sweets
Healthy
Very very cute wintery gingerbread house…I think we used the same MS template and despite the issues you had, I love what you did with yours!
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You house looks great. Merry christmas!
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Oh Simone, I absolutely love it. It’s ethereal and such fun. I loved the challenge this month because it had real challenge and was very satisfying. I was lazy too with the cut outs…very abstract. The snowmen are adorable too…and the pictures FESTIVE! Happy holidays to you & your family!
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Awesome! Hubby and I made a gbread house from scratch several years ago and had a ball. He plotted it all out on graph paper and really got into it. We had a ball. Yours looks just great, Simone!
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you did such a great job!!!! btw, I ordered a Canon digital SLR!!!
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Just gorgeous! I love what you did with this challenge, and the sparkling lights of the tree in the background are priceless!
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well, the ginger bread looks stunning!!
wouldn’t ever know there were any flaws in it! lovely job…
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Lovely house and goregous pictures, well done!
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Your gingerbread house is so pretty! I love it! I’ll post about mine soon…
Happy Holidays!
cheers,
Rosa
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Yeah I think gingerbread houses are meant to look good but not really taste great… but I might check out other blogs to see what they said about the taste.
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I’ve never made gingerbread houses….obviously a state of being which has to be corrected…soon! Lovely job
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beautiful! really stunning, well done!
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I really love the chocolates over the top of the roof. Even though you said that was inspired by a dough mishap, it’s the perfect whimsical, architectural touch. Your instincts and skills are spot on!
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WOW!! I cannot even imagine how these things are magically made
Beautifully done.
Happy Holidays & Happy New year to you and your loved ones.
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Merry X’mas & Happy New Year ;D
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Oh my gosh, Simone! I can’t believe how beautiful your house looks! I would never guess you had the concerns you had while making it. Can I come and live in your cute gingerbread house???
Simone, one of the highlights of my year has been getting to know you. You are so talented and so warm and so sweet.
I’m sending you all my warmest wishes for Christmas and all the best in the new year!
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This is a beautiful Gingerbread House. I’ve always wanted to make and design my own ginger bread house…Merry Christmas!
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Sorry the gingerbread was a bit of a dud…the house came out beautifully though. Happy holidays!!
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Simone this is fantastic. I could never dream of doing such a tremendous job. Love it ! Wishing you and you family a merry Christmas and a Happy New year
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goodness your house looks festive! i’m in love with the snowmen outside too.
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Merry X’mas & Happy 2010 to you!!
Your gingerbread house looks so cool!! I’ve yet to try constructing this … Hopefully I’ll someday …
Pei-Lin
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Just fabulous.
May you have friends at your fire, blessings in your home, and joy in your heart.
Merry Christmas x
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Beautiful house and I love your fluffy snow people too! Hope you’re having a very Merry Christmas Simone!
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Your house is both cute and beautiful at the same time! The powdered sugar snow is a nice effect.
Happy holidays!
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Your eskimo snowmen are so cute that it’s killing me
Beautiful photos!
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Awww they look so cute….wintry n lovely.You have a fantastic blog too:)
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I love your snowmen and you can’t really tell you struggled with the project if you just see your final pictures! Glad someone else had issues with the MS template but at least you saw the measurements I wonder if we used the same one.
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Great job on your gingerbread house and I do think it looks fantastic.
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aww so pretty! I love your furry snowman!
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I’m with you, sister! I had exactly the same experience with the dough, pounding, smashing and loads of cursing. But I did enjoy putting it together. I wish I had had more Christmas candy but I was too lazy to go out looking for it. In the end your house is so cute and Christmassy! I love the whole scene! I think you did a great job!
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the hard work paid off, very cute!
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What a lovely little house! If I didn’t read about your dough trials, I would never know you had a problem. My children used to love decorating gingerbread houses – one of the few activities where they would work together without arguing – a Christmas miracle! LOL
Wishing you a blessed, happy and healthy New Year!
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Cute little house! Beautifully photographed, as always!
Happy New Year!
Sawadee from Bangkok,
Kris
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kudos simone for seeing this challenge through! even with the trouble this house looks gorgeous!
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I adore your cute little house. great work.
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Ha ha sounds like you were in my kitchen too. Yes the dough was hard to roll and crumbly. But we managed eventually. And you are so right it is not very palatable…tastes a lot like baking soda. But your results, even with all the pitfalls, are great. Beautiful
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What a cute gingerbread house!! Lovely,…yummie as well!
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I love the shape of your gingerbread house! So cute and festive!
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It’s a pity that it didn’t turn out very tasty, but at least it looks great
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Cute house!!!! Your pictures are beautiful!
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Kudos to you!! the house looks stunning, very festive. I loved this month’s challenge as i too made my gingerbread for the first time and had lots of fun
Wish you and your family a very happy and properous new year!
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I love the shape of your house, its fairytail like. Love how you decorated it, it really looks snowy
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Simone..your GB house should be on the cover of a magazine! It looks exactly how one thinks of a gingerbread house..perfectly executed and so beautiful, not to mention yummy! BTW, I’m looking at sturdier tripods. I need to break this phobia..LOL Have a wonderful New Year!
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Yes, a lot of us had dough trouble. But your house still looks adorable, and I love the little snowmen and candy canes! Happy New Year, Simone!
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I always thought these were just for decoration. I never imagined they were actually for eating but what do I know. I have always admired but never made one on account of our warm weather and ants which would surely overrun the house if I tried this. Fantastic and very whimsical- even if the taste wasn’t all that – still worth the effort.
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