Made-from-Scratch Gingerbread House, Part Two: Making the Mansion

I'll tell you right now my biggest secret, and my biggest tip, for making gingerbread houses that are yummy and awesome and actually, you know, EDIBLE:

Don't use royal icing. Use melted chocolate.

We saw this tip one weekend when we were all chilling in the bedroom and Matt was flipping the channels, looking for football scores. We passed the Food Network, and there they were showing a giant gingerbread house bake-off. Two teams built plywood houses about six feet tall, but then they covered them in gingerbread and decorated them with candy and stuff.

We watched that show, riveted, for the entire hour, until, I was happy to note, the team with the less creative plan but the vastly sounder construction practices won out over the team that had lots of big plans, but also had cracked gingerbread and unsticky royal icing, and they thew a couple of tantrums, to boot.

But in this show, one team--and then the other, after they STOLE the idea from the team with sound construction tactics--used melted chocolate instead of royal icing. And it was brilliant, I say. Brilliant.

So...bag of chocolate chips thrown into a fondue pot and set to just warm. It takes a little longer to solidify, and at a couple of points in time during the house construction I actually put the houses outside on the below-freezing porch for a few minutes to completely harden, but other than that, it worked brilliantly. For the girls, I used my same kid-friendly construction tactic that worked so well with the haunted chocolate graham cracker houses, and I spooned some melted chocolate into little individual bowls for each of them, and gave them a clean popsicle stick for application. They're both used to using paste (which I HATE) at school, so this was easy for them to master.

Another tip? Don't actually have the small children in the building while you build the house itself. That way they're not driving you nuts while you don't have any hands free, and you're not tempted to go ahead and let them get started decorating before the house is ready because they're driving you nuts.

And another tip? Invite over adult friends, ideally friends without kids of their own, to help out. I invited over three dear grad student friends, and I found that the ratio of two adults per each child was actually about perfect. You have one kid to eat lots of candy and put some random stuff on the house every now and then, two adults to eat a little candy and put lots of stuff on the house, and plenty of gossip to go around.

The end result was a couple of gingerbread houses to be VERY proud of:

I have to admit that Sydney's is my favorite of the two, just because when we were at the candy store buying the candy for this project, each time it was her turn to choose she kept choosing all these weird gummy animals--sharks, millipedes, worms, etc. And so it's pretty hilarious to look at her house just above, for instance, and to notice how there's a shark on the roof, trying to eat his way inside.

And the millipedes have discovered an open window! I don't like the chances of the poor gingerbread children trapped within:I didn't get any photos of this year's gingerbread construction, being too busy gossiping and having hands too sticky with melted chocolate and gummy things, but here's Sydney, directly after hand- and face-washing and at the peak of her sugar high:Very proud of her accomplishment, don't you think?

Will, however, seems to have her eye a bit more on the prize:

After we chose their candy at the candy store in the mall, I had each child take a turn going to stand right outside the entrance to the store, where I could see her, but with her back turned. The other child then had a chance to pick out a Christmas present for her sister, which was immediately given to the clerk and wrapped in a bag in secret. It took Willow about five seconds to choose a gigantic lollipop for Sydney. When it was her turn, it took Sydney about five seconds to choose another gigantic lollipop, but she really wanted this one for herself. I told her that she was choosing a gift for Willow, NOT for herself, that there was no chance on this planet that she would be permitted to take home a lollipop for herself on this shopping trip, and so she let the clerk take the lollipop and wrap it away for Willow, but she was not happy.

Willow has always been a really generous kid by nature--of course, she's spoiled enough with material possessions that she can afford to be--and in the car, then, on the way to school, she spared nary a thought for what Sydney might have chosen for her as a gift. Sydney, of course, has been the younger sister forever, and she's always very concerned about getting her fair share out of life. So in the car, all she did was whine and whine and whine. She wanted a big lollipop. She WANTED a big lollipop. She really wanted a big lollipop.

Listening to this, Willow wasn't tempted to either spill her secret, or to tease her sister about it. She just sat there in her car seat, a huge smile on her face.

But at one point, clearly unable to hold it in any longer, she looked at her sister across the back seat and exclaimed, "Oh, Sydney, I am so excited!"

I can't freakin' WAIT for Christmas.

Family Hour: Uncle Wiggily

If I start dinner by 5:00 (which means we haven't had any afternoon playdates or visitors, or gone anywhere too fun for too long after school, and we don't plan to go anywhere fun in the evening), and I sit down with the girls to eat by 6:00 (which means they're not too involved in play to pitch a fit about dinnertime, and they haven't been too involved in helping me make dinner to delay its production, and they haven't wooed me away from dinner prep to read stories or help with games so that dinner is burned), and Matt can get home to join us by at least 6:30 (he generally nukes a chicken breast to add to my vegetarian dinners, and he also eats REALLY slowly, and the girls also finish first and then pester the life out of him because they're so excited to see him), we generally have time for an hour or so of doing something all together as a family starting at around 7:00 (if it doesn't take too long to straighten out a play area, and if the girls don't have a tantrum about helping to clean up after dinner, and if they're not already totally exhausted from their day and clearly ready for bed):
Uncle Wiggily is a favorite choice. Willow has mastered the game by now and just enjoys playing it, but Syd still has a lot to explore in terms of number recognition and turn-taking and moving the piece one hop per number and stopping when you've reached that number, etc.:

And at around 8:00, we all write where we've left off on a sticker so we can start there again the next time, and then we have teeth-brushing, pajamas, a chapter of Bambi, an episode of Meerkat Manor, some streaming Pandora radio in the dark, and then it's just the dad and me.

We're exhausted, of course.

Made-from-Scratch Gingerbread House, Part One: Infrastructure

We did some things differently this year:

No kit gingerbread house, with its thick, heavy slabs of inedible gingerbread.
No royal icing, because raw egg whites? No.

This gingerbread is made from scratch, and even if I have to get out my hot glue gun, it will NOT fall down, by god.

Instead of those gingerbread house kits, (and boy, they were tempting, and priced to sell!), I used the basic gingerbread recipe from the Celebrating Christmas web site. I was extremely surprised to note that this recipe calls for no ginger--where the hell did it get the name gingerbread, then?--and there's no point in the recipe that actually calls for the one-half cup of water listed in the ingredients, although when the gingerbread dough still seemed extremely dry at the end of the recipe, I noticed that half-cup of water, threw it in, and...perfect!!!

At one point in time (our wedding, perhaps?) we were gifted with a set of about a billion plastic cookie cutters--over the years I've culled the absolutely ridiculous ones, so that we're left with a somewhat basic set of shapes, with a few seasonal cutters and some vintage odds and ends that I've collected here and there (mental note: buy me some dinosaur cookie cutters sometime!). For the gingerbread house, after I got the man to roll out the chilled dough to the perfect 3/16 of an inch thickness--
--I used a smallish square with a triangle whose base matched the length of the square right on top of it, and I cut around the two with a steak knife so that I wouldn't cut the shape in two:This is the front and rear of the house with the gable on top. That same small square can make the two sides of the house, and any larger square can make the two sides of the roof, with eaves that extend appealingly on all sides.

The dough recipe made enough for me to make a house for each of the girls, and probably could have made one or two more houses if you didn't allow for two little girls, one small--

--and one a little larger----to cut out their own gingerbread masterpieces.

And thus, at rest lie future gingerbread mansions, unaware of their glorious fate:

Wait until you see what we're using instead of royal icing.

Bright Little Fingernails

Basically the only way that the girls will let me trim their nails is if I announce, apropos of nothing, "Hey, let's trim your nails really quick so that you can paint them!"I'm pretty sure this would work with boys, too, because the nail polish colors are AWESOME--purple basecoat with alternating green polka dots and orange stripes, or each fingernail half red and half pink and the thumb is blue, or, if you're a traditionalist, you could just go for the red and white "candy cane" paint job.
Of course, this is mainly the plan in the little girls' heads. No matter how carefully I talk them through proper manicure procedure, the paint job does always reveal itself to be child-engineered in a multitude of ways. But, eh--the kids love it anyway.

Best part, though?

The best part is however long I can convince them to sit quietly just like that so that their nails can dry. It's never long enough to actually allow their nails to dry fully, of course, but I will take any small amount of peace that I can get.

Stash Wrap

The goal? Wrap all my Christmas presents using only my stash, none of which consists of traditional wrapping materials.

Okay, my real goals are as follows:

• Finish making all my Christmas presents, wrapped or not.
• Have a couple of the girls' friends and their moms over for hot chocolate after school on Friday and actually be prepared with hot chocolate and pumpkin bread and a clean(ish) house.
• Make a gingerbread house from scratch with the girls. Have this house be extremely unlike last year's failed gingerbread shack.
• Psych myself up for Christmas week with my parents.
• Stop eating when I'm bored.

But wrapping my Christmas presents using only stash is also a good goal, don't you think?

Katie's quilt was the easiest, requiring only a piece of twine. These gifts from the girls to their small cousins (handmade matching games, which I'll talk you about later, but trust me, they are SUPER fun), are wrapped in an envelope folded from notebook paper, with a hole punched in the top flap and a piece of ribbon threaded through and tied in a knot to close the envelope--no glue or tape required!This handmade present from the girls to one grandma is tied with some wide satin single-fold bias tape--I used to use this type of bias tape when I first started making simple quilts, before I knew how easy it was to make my own bias tape, and so I don't remember if I bought this bias tape way back then or later acquired it as a hand-me-down from someone. I tied the bow separately and hot-glued it and the gift tag on. When wrapping gifts, I am starting to heart myself some hot glue!

This is another present to another grandmother, but tied this time with a wired ribbon. I bought this ribbon on clearance post-Valentine's Day one year because I wanted to see if I liked wired ribbon--I don't:

And, of course, the ubiquitous gift wrapped in the comic section:I made a nice, big bow out of strips cut out from the comics, but I didn't use any proper bow-making method, just lots of hot glue.

Only twelve more child-free hours until Christmas! Tomorrow, especially since there's no storytime at the library, I dearly desire to complete three little superhero capes for three little superhero cousins. I also desire to finish The Liar's Club, make gingerbread dough, and buy cinnamon essential oil.

Ah, to dream...

Willow Blogs: A Car Could Go Anywhere, Except on the Grass

This car is mostly for driving, but the red thing on top falls off all the time:
This is the bottom. It was very hard to build it. There's a sword on the other side of the axe, but you can't really see it. They're mostly for pretend killing people that are Lego mens. The pinwheel would blow if it was a real car. Sometimes it falls off. The arm that's on the car is mostly for chomping people that are pretend bad guys. Now, as you can see, on the rest there's a window down at the bottom, and then there's some wheels: If it was a real car, that red thing on top would swing:

You can drive it around, but some things will fall off. If you hold on too tight, some things will fall off from the car.

A T-Shirt Quilt for Christmas

Some leftover bias tape that just happened to match the blanket back, a couple of hours machine-binding while watching episodes of Miami Ink on Netflix (If you got another tat, what would it be?), and one Christmas present is done and DONE:
I don't get to see my little cousins often enough (although thank gawd for Facebook), so it was quite fun to get this glimpse into the life and times of a 13-year-old girl. I love, for instance, how a teenager's passions can so easily range from air-brushed dolphins--
--to sexy werewolves:I'm totally on Team Jacob, too. Real men don't sparkle.

And, personalized T-shirts? Make wrapping Christmas presents WAY easier:
Next on Santa's list are superhero capes for three even littler cousins. And since that means getting out the Cricut, who knows what other wonders will emerge?