We built this city on rock and roll

[venta]

I've written here before about going to Cake Parties - the principle is simple: make cake, take cake to party, eat cake. Then we tried a pie party, which worked pretty well. This time the host decreed we were going to have a Christmas party. She would provide us with turkey curry and mulled cider, the rest of us were to bring Christmassy cakes.

The trouble is, once other guests had bagged mince pies and Christmas cake, I couldn't think of anything else. Stollen? Christmassy, but the party includes a lot of marizpan-haters (and I suck at yeast-based cookery). Chocolate log? Meh, I can't get that excited about chocolate.

Then, sitting in the pub a few weeks back, Jamie said "why don't you make a gingerbread house?"

Now, I love cooking. I am, however, better suited to the bung-it-in-and-then-taste approach of, say, stews than I am to the precise arts of bakery. Also, my icing skills are very limited. Still, a gingerbread house sounded like fun, and the BBC obligingly provided a simple-looking recipe with templates.

Although I do rate the BBC food site as a resource for recipes, it has one huge problem: all the recipes are only in metric quantities. This isn't insurmountable; I did n years of education using SI units, and am capable of spinning my scales round to use those new-fangled gram things. However, I don't think in metric. So I cheerfully measured out the flour... 600g flour, ok, that's that mark on the scale, that's looking like a lot, 600g, wait a minute! That's, like, more than a pound of flour! How the hell much gingerbread am I making here?

I'd also run into problems with the golden syrup. I wish people would measure syrup by weight in recipes, not by the tablespoonful. A tablespoonful of treacle is a very approximate beast. The recipe said seven, but by the time I'd done five I already thought it was looking a bit silly and stopped.

Whether it was actually looking silly, or whether my dough took offence at my using Stork instead of butter (dairy-allergic friends), is unclear but things looked quite unhappy when mixed together. The recipe suggested a remedy if the dough wouldn't come together, but not if it were practically of a pouring consistency. I opted for more flour and a period of chilling in the fridge, and it came out OK in the end.

So, you[*] cut the bits out using the template...


Do not attempt to follow the BBC's advice and roll out the dough on baking parchment. At least, not unless you have patented some form of parchment with non-slip grip on one side to stop the stuff from sliding madly around on the worktop.

Then you bake the panels, and trim them back to size. BBC's instructions said to allow them to "firm up" before trimming. I say, trim 'em straight out the oven. BBC's way results in ginger shrapnel all over the kitchen, mine results in burnt fingers. Pay your money, take your choice.

You now have a flatpack:


By the way, yes I've seen pictures of the GBBO gingerbread collisseum. And a gingerbread Serenity. I'm fundamentally making a shed :)

And you start gluing it together:


The glue is royal icing, which I've neither made nor used before, so wasn't completely sure what I was aiming for. I committed one of the cardinal sins of icing-making - chucking all the dry ingredients in at once. Maybe my eggs were on the small side. Maybe the omens were wrong. But I think my icing came out too stiff... it worked pretty well as glue, but I'm fairly sure that it wouldn't have been right for doing proper stuff with.

You're supposed to allow the walls to dry for a few hours before adding the roof. I filled in the time by going to Kentish Town to see Rancid, then came home and glued the roof on before bed. I left some handy biscuit cutters supporting the weight overnight, just in case.



And in the morning... yay, everything was stable. Bring on the sweets! I'd wanted some edible glitter, but could only find shimmery spray paint... so I spray painted the roof tiles gold[**] before icing them. The flaked almonds recommended in the recipe looked like an awful lot of bother, and I didn't think they brought a whole lot to the party.

The BBC's instructional video showed how to make icicles along the endges of the roof... which I quite failed to do. I'm unsure if this was down to poor-consistency icing, a too-small icing nozzle, or fundamental lack of talent.



And a nice window at the back:


The recipe generously said I could make leftover dough into tree shapes "if I liked"... but I figured my biscuit-cutter repertoire limited me to stars or squirrels. Tempting as it was to surround my house with giant squirrels, I did some stars.

And the house went to the party, and was demolished by small children. And I came home and realised I still had shedloads of gingerbread dough and royal icing, and decided it was time to ditch this Christmas business.



[*] One of the things I always look at in someone else is their hands. I've often claimed (though not verified) that I could recognise a lot of my friends by just their hands. It seems, however, that I wouldn't recognise my own from this photo.
[**] I also lightly spray painted the bread bin, the stereo, areas of the worktop and quite a lot of myself.

Comments

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

That's a much nicer-looking house than I ever achieved.

Then again, my gingerbread had a tendency to go really soft within about five minutes, which didn't exactly help :)