Marialisa Calta is a food writer who lives in Calais.
“This whole gingerbread-house-thing has to be re-thought,” Kevin Crafts was saying. “I mean, they’re so elaborate. So … gingerbread-y.”
It was many years ago, when Crafts and I were talking about those sweet little houses of horror that appear on the cover of magazines every year about this time. Specifically, we are discussing why otherwise sane adults — people with way too much to do in their everyday lives — at Christmas time take on the construction of a miniature three-story Victorian, complete with gables and cupola, using cookie dough as their medium. For their helpers, they choose small, sugar-sensitive children already made crazy by holiday hype.
Now Crafts — a food stylist and cookbook author living in Connecticut — knows a thing or two about gingerbread houses. Primarily, he knows that “it is far easier to make plane reservations and leave town until after New Year’s than it is to build a house of dough.” He learned this the hard way, by promising a modest Tudor (“no pool, no tennis courts”) to a friend who thought her children’s Christmas would be incomplete without one. Wire coat hangers and wood glue were not enough to keep the building upright. Crafts, who wrote about the experience in his quirky cookbook “Desperate Measures” said that on the few occasions his friend has talked to him since the debacle “she has never failed to mention the disappointment that she and her children faced that Christmas morning.” His chapter on Christmas is subtitled “It’s a Semi-Wonderful Life.”
I myself — being one of those normally sane adults previously mentioned — succumbed to gingerbread madness 30 years ago, when my elder daughter was almost 3. “Lo, the magic of Christmas!” I thought, as I perused the magazine rack at the supermarket check-out line for the dough house of my dreams. My eye was attracted to a real Hansel and Gretel extravaganza, complete with spun-sugar windows and a wrap-around porch. It had window boxes, and a chimney with cottony smoke coming out, and, on the lawn, a tiny mirror pond with teeny children (marzipan? Playmobile?) skating on it. I bought the magazine and spent the next few days neglecting my daughter while I cut out templates. I whipped up large lumps of inedible dough, and then rolled and cut the gingerbread pieces — there were probably about 18 of them, but it seemed more like several hundred — with an X-ACTO knife. I baked them, let them dry, and then made MORE inedible dough to re-cut the pieces that had broken from the first batch.
Finally, the great day arrived: It was time to put the house together and decorate it. Never mind that I had never held a pastry bag in my life: I bought a fancy one, with tips #1 through approximately #400, and I was ready to pipe away. My daughter — a relative stranger up until then to the joys of refined sugar — took one look at the candy I had stockpiled for decorating purposes and fell into a feeding frenzy. (Try telling a toddler that the gum drops are to be saved for the topiary). Wired, she lapped the kitchen table until she collapsed in a heap underneath it, my dream of this lovely mother-daughter project collapsing with her. But I persevered. The side pieces didn’t actually fit together and had to be cemented with huge globs of royal icing. The roof pieces — weighted with Necco wafers, candy hearts, and a “scalloped” border of Lifesaver halves — kept sliding off.
It was getting on towards dinner, but as my husband was out of town and my daughter had crashed, I munched a handful of Skittles and kept going. I downsized my plans: forget the cupola, and the fanlight above the door. The window boxes would have to go. No one would really miss those marzipan skaters.
It was well after midnight when I admitted defeat. Royal icing had hardened on my eyebrows, and I had Jujubes stuck to my hair. I got the thing into the trash and spent the rest of the holidays scraping royal icing off the cabinets.
A friend from Brookfield met similar defeat on the frosted roof of a gingerbread barn. The cupola caved. None of the animals stood up. She still sounds a little bitter that she bought the forms from a bakeware collection labeled “Fun & Easy.” In the end, she said, she left the edifice crumpled on the dining room table for her husband’s amusement. He’s a volunteer fireman and, she said, “it resembled nothing so much as a burned-out building.”
So, what’s going on here? To paraphrase neurologist-author Oliver Sachs, nostalgia is about a fantasy that never took place. In the Christmas of our dream childhoods, a delectable little gingerbread house — warmly lit from within by an unseen source — sits on the table, complemented by the Lionel train set under the tree. And don’t forget the pony out back.
“Gingerbread houses give specific form to the idealized notion of Christmas,” said Lorraine Bodger, who had her fill of holiday joy while writing “The Christmas Kitchen.” Bodger, a friend from childhood who died two years ago, devoted no less than 15 pages of her award-winning book to dough construction: five to miniature cookie houses, and 10 to a large gingerbread cottage, complete with tiny window shutters with curlicue piping and a path paved with chocolate-covered raisins and lined with frosted peppermints and candy canes.
“You look at a gingerbread house and you get a certain feeling,” Bodger said. “You want the feeling, not the house.”
“Gingerbread houses are about dreaming,” said Marlene Sorosky, author of “Season’s Greetings.” “People love to look at them, and to fantasize that they have the kind of life — the money, the help — to afford them the time to sit and play and make a gingerbread house.”
One person’s dream, of course, is another’s nightmare. Just flipping through the 21 pages of instructions for the gingerbread Notre Dame Gingerbread Cathedral in Rose Levy Beranbaum’s book, “Rose’s Christmas Cookies,” gives me the shakes. Levy herself credited an architect with helping her translate Notre Dame into dough.
“It was so very ultimate,” Berenbaum said of the cookie cathedral. “I wanted to do something really over-the-top.”
Which leads me to Rule # 1 of gingerbread baking: Avoid all recipes that require a degree in architecture, unless you already have one.
Rule # 2: Avoid recipes that require a plywood or Fome-Cor infrastructure. In general, it’s a good idea to eschew patterns that use words like “pediment” and “pilaster” or “flying buttress.” Likewise, destroy those that require “flood work” (a technique used to “paint” with icing) or gilding.
Rule # 3: If you are going to let the kids help decorate, you have to let go of your dream of perfection, as Abigail Johnson Dodge, a pastry chef and food stylist, advised. Although she has worked in professional kitchens, when her kids were young, Dodge said she saved “one side for mom” and let her kids go wild on the others.
Rule #4: Want to save your lovely cottage for Christmas Future? Fuggedaboudit. You can wrap it in dry-cleaner bags, deep-six it in Styrofoam peanuts. and hide it away in that “cool dry place” mentioned in the instructions, and I guarantee the mice will get at it. (I have a friend in Charlotte who says the mice got at hers while it was still on her mantle, requiring her to include mousetraps in her landscaping plans.)
I have developed these rules because I know that some of you, despite my dire warnings, will sally forth this Christmas with hope in your heart and an X-ACTO knife in your hand. Nothing will do but that perfect little gingerbread house that you think you remember from your childhood.
I know this because I disregard these warnings myself. Despite my holiday of horror 30 years ago, I persisted in pursuing my dream of dough. And every Christmas, my two daughters and I make Lorraine Bodger’s Miniature Cookie Houses. They stand up. The roofs don’t slip off. They are actually fun to make and “the kids” — now 30 and 33 — enjoy it. Best of all, the recipe makes at least three, so I get one to decorate all by myself.
Or, you could do what Kevin Crafts suggested, and follow his grandmother’s lead.
“Each year, she sent us the most perfect, giant, gaudily-decorated gingerbread house,” he recalled.
“She bought it at a store.”
COOKIE HOUSE INSTRUCTIONS
What you will need:
A recipe for cookie dough (see Step #3)
Baking sheets
Baking parchment
Spatula
Templates cut from cardboard
Electric mixer for making royal icing (See step #10)
Piping bags (with a tip or two) or plastic food storage bags and scissors
Candies, sprinkles, etc. for decorating
Patience … and a sense of humor
1. Start a few days ahead of time. Don’t try to make the dough, cut the templates and decorate the house all in one day. You can make the cookie dough well ahead and refrigerate it or freeze it.
2. Make cardboard templates using the cookie house templates provided (below).
3. Make cookie dough (recipe of your choice; look for recipes for gingerbread ornaments, as they make a tougher cookie. Example: http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/the-most-wonderful-gingerbread-cookies-80156)
4. Roll dough out to about ¼-inch thickness. Cut pieces using the cardboard templates and a sharp knife.
Note: If you want to illuminate your house (after it is done and set on a mantel, table or shelf) cut small doors in the end pieces and small windows in the side pieces. You can then insert a light from a string of Christmas tree lights inside.)
Note: To save dough, I usually cut the base out of thick cardboard, not dough. Cover with foil before assembling house.
5. Transfer the dough pieces to a cookie sheet lined with baking parchment. Place each cardboard template over each piece and trim with a sharp knife if the pieces have stretched during transfer.
6. Bake according to recipe directions. You want to over-bake a tiny bit.
7. The minute the cookies come out of the oven, lay the templates over each piece and trim with a sharp knife (Cookies tend to swell while baking … and you need to do this quickly before they get too crispy to trim.
8. Cool the cookies thoroughly. It doesn’t matter if they get stale.
9. Gather your decorations: sprinkles, small candies (M&Ms, Skittles, Red Hots, Necco wafers, mini-marshmallows, red licorice, gum drops, Lifesavers, Jujubes, etc).
10. When ready to assemble, make royal icing. You can use a mix, or meringue powder, if you are worried about salmonella in the egg whites. I use this recipe: 1 pound confectioner’s sugar beaten on high speed with ¾ teaspoon cream of tartar and 3 egg whites for 5 minutes.
11. Spoon icing into piping bags with a small tip, or plastic food storage bags (cut a tiny hole in one corner).
Using the icing as glue, decorate each piece of the cookie house before assembly. (I have seen people assemble the house and then glue on the decorations…that seems to work well, too).
Pipe icing along the bottom and sides of the back piece of the house and position on the round base. Pipe icing along the bottom of one of the side pieces, and glue it to the side. Reinforce with a blob of icing at the bottom corner. Repeat with second side piece of the house, then the front piece, allowing the pieces to dry as you work.
Add the roof pieces; this takes patience … you may have to hold the roof pieces on for a spell while they dry.
12. Step back and admire your work!!!
