Gingerbread house adventure
I learned a lot in the process of trying to make an allergen-free gingerbread house, mostly via the process of realizing belatedly that I shouldn’t do the thing I just did. It was, shall we say, a challenge. It was also, in the end, delicious.
My goal was to bake the gingerbread for a group decorating event with Jane Calvert of Food Focused Nutrition, and The Affirmative Couch, scheduled on a mid-December Sunday. Jane provided some recipe suggestions, so I didn’t have to do the research myself (thanks Jane!). I just popped over to the websites recommended and went from there. For the gingerbread, I followed a gluten-free Vegan Gingerbread House recipe from the Banana Diaries, using a gluten-free flour blend from the Minimalist Baker, and making the cookie dough but not the icing. This recipe produced enough dough to provide two sets of cut outs for (large) houses, plus enough remaining dough for a good-sized future batch of cookies. If you only want to make a gingerbread house or two, I would suggest halving the recipe.
The gingerbread recipe offered a couple of cut-out template suggestions for the non-architecturally gifted. I chose the first one - this template from Sally’s Baking Addiction. Using this template led to learning one of the things I learned, in the manner I learned them (i.e. “don’t do that”). The template is large, and gingerbread is heavy. Holding each cookie piece in place while assembling a house can be challenging at the best of times, especially if you don’t have three or four hands. Doing so with large, heavy cookies slows and complicates the process…and can easily result in a cookie catastrophe.
Next year I’ll choose a smaller house template or roll the gingerbread thinner than recommended so that the pieces are lighter. Either way, I recommend baking the dough in a sheet and quickly cutting the pieces as soon as you take it from the oven, or trimming the pre-cut pieces again immediately after baking. Like any cookie dough, this one spreads in the oven, distorting the shape of your house pieces.
For decorating and “gluing” the house together, the group used an aquafaba-based icing recipe from Recipe Keeper, which was easy to make and tasted great. It also provided my second *important* lesson regarding gingerbread house making. Be sure you have enough powdered sugar to make a very thick icing! A thin or medium consistency will glaze your pieces nicely (like my roof tiles), but it will NOT hold your house together, especially if it’s made of heavy gingerbread. Constructing my house took a couple days and some ingenuity, propping the partially assembled building in various ways so that the most recently added piece was horizontal until the icing securing it dried. Even then, the finished house held together only for a few minutes before one side of the roof slid off and broke.
The challenge of construction came later in the process, however. For the event I followed Jane’s recommendation to decorate the individual pieces first, chatting with the group, and enjoying seeing each group member’s creation. Most were colorfully accessorized with a variety of candies. Mine, being corn-free, was rather monochromatic. It is possible to get candy made without corn syrup (such as YumEarth brand), but I chose, instead, to embrace alternative possibilities, making my house with dried fruit, allergen-free chocolate chips, and shredded coconut. Icing can also be used for additional decoration, if it’s not as fluid as mine was!
As it is with many projects, the end result of my gingerbread adventure wasn’t what I had imagined. But as it also should be with projects, the fun was in the process…and in this food-related project, also in the eating!
