Gingerbread!!

The final weekend before Christmas break, we made our Gingerbread house and cookies too! It was the fifth round of Christmas cookies this year! The night before, I made a double batch of the Gingerbread recipe, but it did not feel right, so Emily helped me add 1/4 cup of flour at a time, and by the time it started feeling solid enough, she'd added almost another complete recipes' worth! So, we added more of each of the other solid ingredients to make a triple batch!

The next morning, my first round into the mold felt too soft, so we added that final flour measure, and the rest of the dough was perfect!

You can see Emily mixing the premade dough with flour, and Grace cracking the half dozen eggs for egg whites to make the icing!

While round one was in the oven, and we were mixing the icing, Emily scrambled the yolks for us, and we traded off turns mixing the icing.  Sadly, the icing took the life of my favorite whisk. = (  So, that's what I requested as my stocking stuffer this year (since stocking stuffers are this year's point of controversy on social media.  Mine will not be empty, for the record. = ))

Once the icing was ready, and the pieces had cooled completely, we started assembling our house!  The first round was a little soft, and because of the broken whisk, the icing was a little under whipped, so the house took some holding and prodding to stay in place.

The candy canes came from the parade, where Emily and Alice marched with the robotics team.  Sadly, they were all broken, and we were going to trash them, but inspiration struck, and we were able to save them and use them to adorn our less than perfect house! = )

With three recipes worth of gingerbread, we had so much dough leftover after making our house.  So, we made lots and lots of cookies!

Each of my dear ones took turns with the icing bag, decorating as many cookies as they wanted!

So many cookies!

I had made an extra round of house, just in case the first one was too soft (which it was, but it was serviceable) so we cut the pieces of the house into cookie sized servings!

Grace and Juliet took cookies to pass out to their entire class, Emily took some for her friends and teachers, William took one for each of his teachers, we gave some to our neighbors, and still had plenty to eat on the rest of the day!

Alice has been eating on the house all week, so it must be okay!  (Typically, the house pieces are much crunchier than the cookies, but the triple recipe did not reflect that.)

Next year, hopefully I remember to make a single recipe at a time.  And if I want a second round, make it separately!

later days

edit: backdated for continuity 12-23-23