Daring Bakers-December 09 Challenge-Gingerbread Houses!

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.



The options for this month's challenges could have gone into the crazy zone (I had visions of a cuckoo clock gingerbread house or a whole miniature village), but I decided that since this was my first gingerbread house EVER, I should probably just keep it simple to start. Good thing, because I learned a whole lot, the most important is that gravity was not my friend. I used Vegan Dad's recipe and advice, with good results. Dough was awesome and strong, and bonus, tasty! The icing ended up being my enemy, pairing with gravity. I countered this by decorating some, sticking in fridge, repeat, until things had somewhat solidified on. Toothpicks also helped to hold things together, and were later removed after chilling.

I'm not so sure there are any cuckoo clock gingerbread houses in my future, but it was a fun project (also, it was waaay fun visiting Economy Candy!)