Gingerbread!

So the other day I was complimented on how up-to-date I am with my blog. So to disprove this I thought I should write this post, which is either 2 months or 1 year, 2 months late. Depending on how you look at it.

I thought I'd show you the gingerbread houses that I've made over the past two years.

First, the 2009 Gingerbread House

As you should do before you make any gingerbread house, I started by collecting a large amount of decorating candy.
Then I put the house together. In the past we've used boiled sugar glue to stick the house together but that usually results in burnt fingers and burnt-sugar covered gingerbread that no one wants to eat.
So instead I found a recipe for a cement-like royal icing. Which worked a lot better, and was much tastier.

Next you decorate it...
Don't forget the Christmas Hippo in the garden.

The hardest part of this whole project was the candy-cane fence. It was really, really hard to find enough candy canes that were still in one piece to use. And then you still had to make them stand up. It was tricky, but it looked really neat.
The finished product. Our family Gingerbread House for Christmas 2009.

Then, this past year, for Christmas of 2010, my younger cousins were in town for a pre-Christmas visit so I thought that it would be fun for all of us to make gingerbread houses. We made two of them, one for them to take home and one to stay at our house.

This is the house my cousins made, it was fairly traditional, and covered in tasty, tasty candy.
They did some really cute stuff with it, like a skating rink.
And a little man in overalls with his snowman.
A reindeer on the roof...

And Penguins on the back wall!
The finished product!
Apparently the Gingerbread house survived the 8 hour drive home (except for the roof corner that I accidentally broke while trying to put in a box to go home) but most of the candy did not!

I decided to do something a little different this year and so, instead of a traditional gingerbread
house I constructed a gingerbread barn!
There's a pond with a frog...
A pen with some animals and a silo. I wanted to make the silo completely purple-y blue, like the one the farm where I spent parts of my summers while I was in high school.

There is also a farmer in the front yard.
I put the hayloft on the wrong part of the barn. But its still cute.

I found all the patterns online and a whole bunch more that I want to try. Next year I'm going to be very tempted to make an entire gingerbread town!

So, now, what you probably are looking for, the recipe for my Gingerbread! Now, there is a story behind this recipe: when I was in elementary school, every Christmas time students from the 5th grade class would come around and sell raffle tickets. At the assembly before Christmas break there would always be a draw for trees, people, a big house and a little house. I would always buy tickets, and I never won a thing. However, when I was in Grade 5 myself, the whole class got to help make the gingerbread, and my mom helped out too. And she had the thought, to ask for the recipe! So now, I every Christmas I can buy the gingerbread that I could never manage to win!

Group 1:
1 cup margarine, butter or shortening, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup molasses
2 tbsp vinegar

Group 2:
5 cups flour
1 1/2 baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2-3 tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375. Mix group 1 together. Mix group 2 together. Add group 2 slowly to group 1 until well mixed. Form into a ball, or several smaller balls and chill for an hour or more. Roll out the dough and cut into the shapes you need. Bake for 10-15 minutes.

Usually, I make one batch and it is enough for the house that I am making plus a few extra animals, people, or Santa and some reindeer!

I had a hard time finding a royal icing recipe that didn't call for egg whites, because I'm a little nervous about eating egg whites that have been sitting out for several days. I eventually found this recipe which calls for meringue powder. Meringue powder is an egg white substitute that's a little pricey but great for when you don't want to eat raw egg whites.

3 tbsp meringue powder
4 cups icing sugar
6 tbsp cold water

Beat all ingredients together for 7-10 minutes until stiff peaks form. Keep the icing covered in a damp cloth while you are working with it, otherwise it will stiffen up and will be useless.