Gingerbread Houses: post-modern style

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.

This one was actually squeaked out over the xmas holidays.  The posting schedule was a little wider than usual, and I actually started to panic a little bit as some of the first posts of beautiful gingerbread houses went up starting on the 23rd.

I had already made one gingerbread house (Twitter themed) as part of a twitter team for our local Habitat for Humanity gingerbread display, but, obviously couldnt count that one in, as :

1. I didn’t make it myself,
2. It used construction gingerbread, which was neither of the recipes given by the Daring Bakers hosts, and while edible, was not delicious, and
3. it relied on the clever use of tree branches, so while the actual house walls were freestanding, it included non-gingerbread elements

Just for a teaser, here’s a pic of that house:

So anyway, onto the Daring Bakers Challenge!

I opted to go with the recipe from Good Housekeeping.  It called for no eggs, only cream to bind it, which sounded intriguing.  As I went, it mixed up all right, until the last bit of flour was incorporated, and then it seemed to get almost sandy in texture — quite dry, and not holding together like I thought it should.  I actually ended up adding at least another 1/4 cup of heavy cream before it achieved what I felt was a workable texture.

It was quite stiff to roll out, and as I read through some other DB recountings, I was skeptical about whether this was going to have enough structural oomph to it!  As it turned out, it baked up just fine!

I decided to go modern in feel rather than traditional gingerbread, and found a modern design on the Interwebz, however, it required a bit of modification, as it included some structural supports inside made out of cardboard.  I simply replaced the cardboard with gingerbread in order to meet the DB requirements.

The other new thing I tried with this gingerbread house was to use the sugar syrup method of adhering the pieces together.  I had read about this a while back, and didn’t try it because … well, because I’ve always used royal icing.  The thing about royal icing, however, is that it takes time to set, and requires precarious propping up of pieces with cans and books etc… while the royal icing sets.

The appealing thing about using the hot sugar syrup is that the set is pretty much instant.  Word of warning though — it is hot, and you will probably burn yourself at least once during assembly!  I have to say (burns aside!) that I really like this method, as the joins are VERY solid.

Finally, the embellishment on this one was very simple, relying only on plain royal icing.

I’m having fun looking at all the gingerbread permutations and combination.  Go check them out over at www.thedaringkitchen.com!