Hello hello :) Its Christmas Time and we all know that means lots of family and lots of family traditions (Fiddler on the Roof anybody?). Well, since I've become a Warnick, Mr. Warnick and I have loved coming up with our own family traditions! Last year we started a Christmas tradition that we are going to carry on for a long time. We made gingerbread houses out of real gingerbread.
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| My Gingerbread house 2013 |
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| Mr. Warnick's Gingerbread house 2013 |
We loved it and decided to do it again this year. So on Sunday night we got to design our houses on graph paper and, after making the dough on Monday, I used our templates to cut the pieces of our houses out. They spent a short time in the oven, and after a quick trip to the dollar store for candies we had all the necessities for our houses.
Here are the recipes I used for the Gingerbread and the Royal Icing:
Ginger Bread (from Martha Stewart)
1 1/4 C Packed Brown Sugar
3/4 C Unsulfured Molasses
1/2 C Butter
1 Tbsp Ground Cinnamon
1 Tbsp Ground Ginger
1/2 tsp Coarse Salt
1 1/4 C Milk
1 Tbsp Baking Powder
6 1/2 C Flour
- Combine the brown sugar, molasses, butter, spices, and salt in a pot over medium heat. Let the sugar get nice and dissolved. This will take about 10 minutes (I even let mine boil just a tad). Then add the milk and stir it really well. Once it is all mixed in you can remove it from the heat and let it cool.
Once the milk mixture has cooled down, pour it into a big mixing bowl. I use my beloved Bosch and it works wonders! Add the baking powder and flour and mix all of it together until it is completely combined. Divide the dough in half and shape them into disks. This helps you to have less dough to work with at a time and also helps the dough cool. Wrap the disks in plastic wrap or put in a ziplock bag and squeeze all the air out. Refrigerate overnight. On Monday when I saw that I was supposed to refrigerate overnight I had a "Between the Lions" moment.
Refrigerate overnight?!?!?!?! NAW!!!
But I did refrigerate it for a few hours. While it was cooling I made the Royal Icing and went to the dollar store for our candy.
Once the dough has been refrigerated for at least a few hours (I would say 3 at the minimum, or else its a sticky mess) you can roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface. Roll it till its just 1/8 inch thick. Try to get it so its an even thickness all the way across. That way when you cook your pieces they won't be uneven. It is harder to build a gingerbread house with pieces that don't match in thickness. After the dough is rolled out place your templates on top and cut out your pieces. Preheat the oven to 350 and cover a cookie sheet in parchment paper. Bake the pieces for 15 minutes, and turn the cookie sheet halfway through. This year, right after our pieces finished baking I rolled them with the rolling pin to make sure they were nice and flat and not curved. Once the pieces are completely cool you can start building your house.
Royal Icing (found the recipe here)
1 lb Confectioners Sugar
1/2 C Egg Whites ( you can buy a carton of egg whites at the store so you don't have to separate them from the yolks.)
1/2 tsp Cream of Tartar
Put all of the ingredients in a big bowl and use an electric mixer to mix them until they are very white, shiny, and will hold soft peaks. It can take anywhere from 7-15 minutes. My arm got tired making this and so Mr. Warnick helped me out :) Afterwards, we scooped all of the icing into a big ziplock bag and squeezed all of the air out. This kind of frosting hardens up pretty quick when it is exposed to the air so it is important to get it into an airtight container of some sort.
The next step is to buy candy. Buy anything that you can imagine decorating a gingerbread house with. This year we ended up with gum drops, the round mint candies (green and red varieties), candy canes, m&ms, sno caps, chocolate wafers, the peely twizzlers, pretzel sticks, and cinnamon toast crunch (I used this for shingles on my roof, chex would probably work pretty well too).
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| My Gingerbread house 2014 |
Mr. Warnick hasn't quite finished his house yet because he used the icing to decorate his roof so it looks all snowy. It looks really good, but it took a long time to dry.
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| Mr. Warnick's Gingerbread house 2014 (a work in progress) |
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| Look at that awesome snowy roof!!! |
