Daring Bakers - December 2009 - Gingerbread Houses

Hello!

Well, this is my first Daring Bakers post as I sadly missed last month. While going to the Grey Cup was quite the experience, it bumped my plans to bake cannoli! Oh well. I guess I'll just have to redeem myself with a gingerbread house this month.

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.

I ended up making my gingerbread house with a friend from work and her kids. Because I was making it with her, she had already done the gingerbread up ahead of time, so I didn't have a chance to use one of the recipes provided. However, I used it for something else, which I'll explain later. As for my house, I went over to her place and we spent 3 hours rolling and baking gingerbread to make 4 houses. I started off with quite a monstrosity:



However, after a tragic accident while we were trying to secure her house, the front fell off of mine! Oh no! Well, as any cook or baker knows, you have to be able to improvise. So, I took the pieces I had and created a new gingerbread house in a different shape (mine is on the left):


By this point we were exhausted. So exhausted that I forgot I had some peanut butter and a glass in my house to help hold up the walls, but I put the roof on anyway. We solved that by waiting until it dried and then lifting the house off the base to rescue the items!

At this point we left the houses to dry for a few days until we had a chance to get together again for decoration. We ran to the Bulk Barn to get candy for decoration and found ourselves well supplied. After a few more hours of decorating, this is what I ended up with:


Details: Shreddies Shingles, Chocolate Covered Sunflower Seed Christmas Lights, Pretzel Fence, Pretzel Flower Holder, Flowers made of Chocolate Covered Sunflower Seeds, Chocolate Rock walkway/driveway, Nibs Mailbox, White Chocolate Pistole Light, Green-Dyed Coconut Lawn

And then my friend's daughter thought the back of my house was boring, so I added some light around the windows and wrote Merry Xmas out of string licorice.


And when all was said and done, we snuck our houses into the Retirement Home we work at to put on display as a gift from Santa.



As for the provided recipes - I did the first recipe provided from Good Housekeeping and found it to be incredibly dry and crumbly - and I hadn't even added all the flour required. However, after reading the notes from the posters, I took their advice and left it in the fridge overnight to let the moisture spread throughout the gingerbread. This really didn't help and the gingerbread remained crumbly and hard to use. As of right now I haven't had a chance to do anything with it, but once I do, I'll use my go-to solution for things like this - add syrup! A bit of corn syrup will bring it right together so I can roll and bake it.