How is your Christmas prep coming along? Mine is going pretty well. All the presents are bought, wrapped and sent; the cards have been posted; and I have applied my Christmassy nail wraps (a very important step). I don’t have to worry about all that nonsense about buying enough food for an army because, as the black sheep of the family, I always spend the day itself at someone else’s house. But, for the last few years, I have contributed a gingerbread structure each year, so that’s what I was doing all of yesterday, and some of the day before.
This started back in 2015 and I’ve talked about it a bit in the my post on my top 10 films, and some of the structures I have mentioned in my reviews of the year, but someone was asking me about my previous gingerbread creations recently (hello, Wilma!) so I decided to do a quick recap. Here’s my first gingerbread house, which is fairly tame and sticks to the template, apart from the glazed windows (boiled sweets) and the door with a hinge (toothpick) that actually opened.
One thing that you should understand is that my ambition in gingerbread construction always exceeds my ability/experience, so I’m always trying things that are too difficult for me, which means that my creations look very amateurish and homemade. This is not tried-and-tested Mary Berry perfection. But it’s more fun to learn by doing, and my nieces agree that it’s better to attempt something too ambitious than to be too safe.
The following year I made a gingerbread house again, and it does look a bit more polished this time (except the roof tiles go the wrong way) but I added a wee porch that was not in the design. By this time I had got better at windows (you should only put the boiled sweets in for the last ten minutes of baking) and had perfected the trick of pre-icing a line of Smarties where the roof meets the walls, so you don’t have to spend half an hour holding it on while the icing sets.
The following year I used a template again, this time for a medieval castle. But not a Victorian fantasy of a medieval castle, a realistic medieval castle. Realistic, apart from the marzipan dragon guarding its hoard of gold.
We don’t seem to have taken any photos of it before we started eating it, so here is an artist’s impression of what it looked like before:
And if you’re thinking that looks a bit big – yes, it was. Another thing I have learnt is that, if you have to double up the recipe for your gingerbread construction, it will be too big and everyone will be sick of gingerbread by the time it has gone.
The year after that (we’re up to 2018, I think) I had a mini-gingerbread-house template (I think it was a present) so I made a lovely wee village, with shops and a bank and a cafe. I think this was the first time I struck out without a template, to make the church in the middle. Because you can’t have a quaint English village without a parish church, can you? So I just worked it out on cardboard.
I made a video flyover of the village, which gives more detail. The tractor was from the Amazing Chocolate Workshop and the ploughed field is made of Matchmakers. These minty sticks are not just useful for decoration, they are essential for structural support and gap-fixing in more ambitious / poorly executed designs. My top tip for gingerbread construction is: always have a packet of Matchmakers to hand!
And doesn’t that electronic tealight look amazing through the church window?
So, moving on to projects that I designed entirely from scratch: Here is a lighthouse in a choppy sea.
Although you can’t see it well in the photo, it also had an electronic tealight, because otherwise it wouldn’t be a very useful lighthouse, would it? The Matchmakers on the lighthouse are not just there to look nice, they are holding it up. Vertical biscuit is hard to achieve. And you’d better believe there were plenty of Matchmakers on the inside, too! (I am not being sponsored by Matchmakers, in case you were wondering.) You can also just see the wee gummy bear in his rowing boat behind the lighthouse.
Another video, now, of my gingerbread zoo. There was less of the complicated construction here, the challenge was more in the details: how to make 3D trees, how to get a monkey to hang from them by its tail, and how to make my own fondant icing for the grass and water, because my mother is allergic to the pre-made stuff. After rolling and pressing and smoothing it out, my hands were green and blue for quite a while.
I rather like the polar bear under the water. Just a squiggle of icing, but very suggestive of a submerged bear’s body, I think.
By 2021, I had learnt calligraphy (one of my lockdown projects), and you can see the result in the rather lavishly decorated guinea pig hutch below. This was a fun one to work out – not the hutch itself, which was just a box made out of flat panels, but the contents. I settled on lime-flavoured laces for the straw, white chocolate shavings for the woodchip (that took a lot of shaving!), chocolate sprouts for the veg, Maltesers (or maybe Poppets?) for the nuggets and, of course, Matchmakers for the grille.
I was busy being terribly ill last Christmas, and didn’t make anything, so that brings us up to this year. I have a budgie called Artemis, and the Artemis 2 was meant to be launched this year (although it was actually delayed), so that gave me the idea for a gingerbread rocket. It almost went the way of the SpaceX rocket when it started disassembling itself in the oven. Creating curved gingerbread that is also strong enough to stand vertically is incredibly hard, and should not be attempted. Fortunately, with the help of some more Matchmakers and approximately a metric ton of royal icing, my nieces and I managed to patch it together, apply the nose cone (a walnut whip) and keep it upright long enough for the icing to set. We have lift off!
If you feel like joining in, the gingerbread recipe I always use is the BBC Good Food one. It’s firm, delicious, and keeps well out in the open (in pride of place) until you’re emotionally ready to destroy your beautiful creation.
K C Murdarasi 
Most impressive! I’d not describe you as the black sheep though more the favoured auntie.
Sent from Outlook for Androidhttps://aka.ms/AAb9ysg ________________________________
Thank you. I think I offended mum with that description. I obviously see it as a much less scathing term than some people do!
I love building a gingerbread house at Christmas time. Your gingerbread creations look so great. Very festive!